


From the Ashes

by AlterEgon



Category: The First Law - Joe Abercrombie
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-10
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-01-11 19:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 29,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterEgon/pseuds/AlterEgon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After escaping an assassination attempt barely with is life, Arch Lector Sand dan Glokta finds himself in very unusual company. It doesn't take long for him to realise that returning to the life he has led for the past years is not going to be an option. But as one door closes, another opens for him...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thank you to The_Alchemist for beta'ing

Reddagger Keep was a large and bulky thing from the outside. Long walls with few, narrow windows, interrupted by towers, surrounded the main portion of the buildings, leaving only a single entrance open to visitors.

Few visitors ever made it beyond the outermost set of rooms, where they came to present their business proposal, heard the Guild's price, and either paid up, certain that their request would be honoured, or left again to take their business elsewhere.

The Guild did not usually care if someone else offered similar services at a lower price. They delivered quality, and those looking for quality paid what was asked. Those looking for a cheap job got unreliable results, and they deserved them.

However, it was not a good idea to insult your negotiation partner even under the best of circumstances.

Facing the First of the Guild in the lavishly furnished and richly ornamented reception room that reflected all of the Guild's supposed wealth was not  the best of circumstances.

Mikal watched the man dig himself in deeper with every passing moment. Safely unseen and unheard in their observation spot, he and Chrissen shared the amusement of seeing him prance, strut and posture like an oversized peacock in his gaudy robes, trying to impress the First.

If he had asked their advice, they could have told him that he was wasting his time and energy. If it was that particular room's door that opened for a visitor, the price was going to be high simply because he looked like he could afford it.

Ask for a Target of the kind that he had picked, and he was lucky to get the offer he had been given.

Some more prancing, attempts at begging for reason, increasingly agitated posturing and a barely veiled threat did nothing but draw a silent smile from the First later.

"The Target you name is well-protected at the very heart of the Union," the First stated. "You are asking for no mean feat, to have him despatched silently. The price has been named. Take it or leave it."

The visitor spun on his heel. "Very well!" He snapped. "Your price is outrageous! I shall take my business elsewhere then. I believe there are some in your line of work who have not turned into frightened old women yet! I shall find myself a real man to complete this task!"

"Feel free to find a dancing bear for it," the First declared without the slightest change of expression or inflection. "I wish you the best of luck while you're at it."

With a loud bang, the door slammed shut behind the visitor, who stomped outside, presumably to collect his horse and be on his way.

The First turned, looking right at the two young men concealed behind a wall with cleverly concealed spyholes, red hair shining in the light of the candles as if it, too, were made of flame. "Chrissen. Mikal. I want you in here."

They did not ask how the First had known that they had been there, or where exactly along the walls they had been hidden.

They slipped into the room through one of the numerous concealed entrances. The First looked them over.

"I must say, I've grown quite tired of that one's tirades."

They bowed their heads with matching grins.

"Do you name him a Target?" Mikal asked.

"If I'd wanted to name him a Target, he wouldn't have left this room alive," the First snapped. "I am thinking of taking some longer-lasting enjoyment from this rather than give him a swift death. Take two or three others and be on your way. Let me see how effective his 'real men' will be with you there to undo their efforts."

Mikal slowly raised his head to stare at the First. "Are you saying…?" he asked.

"I'm saying, get out there and keep his Target alive." The First's voice had not risen, but the statement was clearly a command. "The same skills that kill a man can be used to keep him safe. Use them. Let him grow frustrated as he realises that nothing he can do will get him the result he wants."

The two men flashed a brief grin at each other. It was not their usual line of work, to be certain, but the First was right about one thing – if they could get close enough to the Target to deliver the kill, they could get close enough to keep it from happening. Their recently-departed visitor would either have to come back and face an even higher price, or abandon his plans and hope that the Target would come to a quick end more naturally.

If he could afford it, chances were that he would go for the first option, in which case he would pay dearly for every single insult that he had heaped on the Guild in the course of the last twenty minutes.

"Vilya," Chrissen said, already one step further in his plans. "She can get into anything."

"And Lissa," Mikal added. "That's all we'll need."

The First nodded. "Then why are you still here?"

As silently as they had entered, the two men stepped back, seemingly disappearing into the very walls. The task may not have been the most _exciting_ one they could imagine, but it beat being stuck in the Keep until someone named a Target that suited their specific talents.

*

Arch Lector Sand dan Glokta limped painfully across the cobblestone courtyard and towards the coach that awaited him. Click, tap, pain, the rhythm of his walking for the last seven years – right leg striding out confidently, cane to support him, and then the long and agonising slide of his mutilated left foot along the ground. He walked marginally more easily on smoother paving. The irregular cobblestones not only offered too many places to stub his inexistent toes on, they also provided precious little purchase for the tip of his cane, threatening to throw him off balance by letting it slip at every step he took.

The pain had crept up to envelop his knee and a good part of this thigh already.

Climbing the steps up into the coach was its very own kind of trial. No one offered a helpful hand, and he did not ask for one.

With a hiss of barely suppressed pain, Glokta eased himself down onto the cushions sideways, gingerly stretching out his left leg on the seat before him.

The morning had not been a good one. Most mornings weren't, especially not now.

They might have been improved, for a very short period of time, by the presence of Ardee, his wife – now dead and buried, killed by the birth of the King's bastard, who had hardly lived long enough to draw breath.

His eyelid twitched, and his left eye started to water. He blinked, angrily wiping at his face with the back of one hand. Couldn't there be at least some part of his body that still obeyed him as it should?

The coach jerked into motion, throwing him against the back of the seat and sending a spasm of searing pain up his back and neck. His remaining teeth ground into empty gums as he bit back a yelp.

It was going to be a long ride, and if its beginning was anything to judge by, a painful one.

At least there was no one in the box with him, to watch him squirm in pain. The Practical and guard he was taking along both rode on top with the driver. As long as he suffered in silence, no one would know that the Arch Lector himself trembled at the thought of taking a trip like this.

Still, his Master had summoned, and he was coming, like a good little dog, meeting up with the envoy of his choice in the place of his choice, to die the death of his choice…

 _A body found floating by the docks_ …


	2. Chapter 2

The coach came to a stop that sent another wave of searing pain from Glokta's neck all the way down into his mutilated foot.

"What is it?" he called out, his voice harsh with suppressed pain and impatience. The sooner they arrived, the sooner he would be able to sit down in a chair that was not moving around below his arse. He hadn't bothered to look outside since the sun had set, but he was quite certain that they were still far from their destination.

"Holdup," he heard his Practical hiss down towards him. "Stay where you are, Your Eminence."

Of course. What else would he do? Jump outside and outrun them, whoever they were? _A mutilated body found by the road_ …

He heard the dull _thud_ of a flatbow bolt striking home, and wondered which one of his companions had been the first to die.

Then all thought was driven from his mind, as the vehicle lurched back into motion, veered off of the path and clattered down the slope, maybe in a crazy attempt to evade whoever they had just encountered, but more likely simply pulled by a team of panicking horses whose handler had just been expertly shot.

His hands clutched at anything they could reach, finding no purchase on the polished wood panelling inside the box and digging into the seat cushions that he had no hope of staying on. He was thrown backwards, his already-aching back dealt another bump and exploding in another burst of agony that took away his breath and very nearly his awareness. Blackness billowed around him, and he tried to fight it down, clinging to each shred of consciousness that he could find. He would not go down that easily, not him, he had not survived two years in the Gurkish prisons to faint because of a spooked horse.

_A broken body found in the remains of a broken carriage…_

He slid onto the bouncing floor, heedless of the screams and shouts audible from outside, tried to keep his head up and away from the corners of the seats—

Until, quite suddenly, _up_ and _down_ no longer mattered as a sickening _crunch_ sounded and the small world of his coach box was turned around, spinning out of control, rolling and tossing him from side to side in it.

In spite of his efforts, his head struck something hard, and merciful, unrelenting darkness swallowed him up.

*

He clawed his way back into the waking world, at first uncertain of where he was or what had happened. Not his bed, that was for sure. His body was twisted in ways that it couldn't manage even in its most creative nights, when it did all it could to cause him the most discomfort in the morning.

There was something hard under his face, smooth and smelling of polished wood with just a hint of blood—

Someone made small, whimpering sounds, as if in great pain. _Shut up_ , Glokta thought viciously. _Shut the fuck up, I can't think like this_.

A rustle from somewhere, a tapping as if from soft footfalls.

Memory rushed back at him. The journey, the holdup, the mad race.

Someone was outside. Should he call out? Should he wait and pretend that the crash had broken his neck as it should have?

_A broken body found in the remains of a broken carriage…_

The agonised sounds were still grating on his ears, and he was just about to hiss a sharp warning at whoever was making them when he realised that they were, in fact, coming from his own throat.

He clamped shut his mouth.

His left side seemed on fire – of course, the left again, always the left. His arm, his leg and his ribs made themselves known in ways that told him that he had no choice but to lie motionless, lest he scream his suffering out into the world and give away that there was still some life left inside this broken body. Not dead yet…

A shape appeared in the moonlit opening of the broken side of the carriage.

Either the man was walking strangely sideways or Glokta was lying in an even more twisted position than he had at first assumed.

"Can't you die already?" a cold voice filled with irritation snarled at him.

Glokta would have liked to give a witty answer to that, but his jaw ached furiously and his tongue had apparently become better acquainted with what teeth he still had left than it should have and was rapidly swelling into a useless, misshapen bit of meat in his mouth.

He stared up at the figure, defiance in his eyes – or so he hoped.

The man raised a hand clutching a dagger—

\--and suddenly froze, eyes going wide in disbelief as a flatbow bolt sprouted from the front of his throat just before he crumpled, the dagger still unthrown.

 _What a pity_.

Another shape in the opening, the flatbow held in an easy grip by its side.

"He's alive."

A woman's voice.

"Looks battered, but alive."

A second shadow blotted out even more of the moonlight. Glokta could just about imagine the two staring down at him as he lay there, possibly bleeding out from injuries he didn't even know about.

"We were meant to keep him alive." That was a man speaking.

"He _is_ alive." The woman again.

Her companion turned away from the twisted body wedged into the remains of the coach and towards her. "For how long?"

With a shrug, she handed her flatbow to someone out of Glokta's sight. "I've seen people in worse condition live," she claimed.

Had she really? Where? He would have liked to ask her, but speaking required air, and in addition to all the problems that he had already determined, air seemed to be in short supply for him right now, each breath sending an explosion of pain through his ribcage.

As one, the two shadows went down on their knees, reaching towards him.

 _Oh no!_ He thought at them, hard, willing them to hear and react. _No, you won't! Don't you dare touch me, you—_

Two pairs of hands closed on him and started dragging him towards the opening.

He had no idea where he suddenly found the air to scream.


	3. Chapter 3

Colonel Glokta was wrestled from his horse and to the ground, dragged away by the Gurkish and struggling all the way. He managed to wrest free one arm and felt a satisfying crunch when his hand connected with a Gurkish nose.

Then stronger hands caught him and twisted his arms onto his back. He fought with everything he had, throwing himself against the ties they were trying to put on him. Someone kicked his right foot out from under him – the left unable to hold him up with a spear wound to the thigh of that leg – and he crashed to the ground. The impact was followed by the tip of a boot to his ribs, cracking some, leaving behind a sharp pain that renewed itself with every breath, but he continued to struggle as he was dragged up again and shackled—

"Let's just not tie him down before someone loses teeth over this." A mild voice penetrating the haze of pain, its tone almost amused, for all that it sounded somewhat clogged.

"Then how do you propose--?" A woman's voice, the sharp tones of an accent he could almost place.

Something heavy settled behind him, shifting the area on which he lay and tearing a groan from him as his body shifted with it.

Large hands on his wrists, not restraining as much as guiding them down.

"You're bleeding." The woman again.

A half-laugh from the man. "You don't say?"

*

The shaking and jostling seemed to go on forever, every jolt accompanied by more pain, old and new injuries alike clamouring for his attention.

He wanted them all to go away and leave him alone.

At least his head rested on something soft.

Two hands kept him from bouncing or rolling too much. He felt the touch of a fingerless leather glove against his skin. Something other than the pain to focus on…

*

Water trickled through his lips and he swallowed mechanically. It appeared that they had stopped. He heard the crackling sounds of a fire nearby. People moved around him. Still, opening his eyes seemed like too much effort.

Approaching steps. A gruff "Thank you".

The steps didn't retreat. Instead there was a rustle of clothing as someone settled nearby.

"Why send you, of all people?" A woman again. The one he had heard earlier? He wasn't sure.

"I'm known for seeing a job through to the end, no matter what." The man, eerily familiar. Something about that voice…

A long pause, stretching out until he started to drift back to sleep.

Someone bent over him, studying his broken body, he imagined.

"What do you see when you look at him?" He wondered if the mild curiosity in her voice reflected in the way she was presently inspecting him.

Silence again, then: "A man in pain." A sigh, followed by more rustling as the two traded place. "Come now, Your Eminence. Let's see if we can't get some soup into you."

The mere mention of the vile stuff made his stomach want to revolt.

*

"I have never seen a body so broken, and broken and broken again and yet alive." The wonder and fascination in that voice could only belong to a surgeon. He had heard it many times before. What an interesting specimen, look at what the human body can endure.

He almost liked 'a man in pain' better.

Someone seemed to be on his side at least. "You're here to treat his new injuries, not marvel at the old ones."

That voice was cold and hard as steel, measured and deliberately pitched, sounding neither male nor female but cutting to the core like a fine blade. He almost opened his eyes then. Almost.

He wasn't given the time. A hand on his arm sent searing agony through his body, drowning out all else.

*

He couldn't have lost a lot of time this time around. His left arm throbbed in a way that suggested he'd not be using it for a long time.

Fools. You don't torture a man not awake enough to answer questions.

Except that they weren't, were they? They were setting his bones, not breaking them – for all that the pain wasn't much different one way or the other.

"Weren't you supposed to keep him alive?" That cold voice again, talking away from him. He frowned mentally. He knew of plenty of people who wanted him dead, but who could possibly want him alive?

"He is alive." A sober statement in the female voice that was already familiar, followed by a half-snort.

"I wasn't aware I needed to specify 'alive and in one piece'."

"And he would be." A new one, though he thought he had heard that voice before somewhere as well. "If his idiot minion hadn't thought to take matters into his own hands and grabbed the reins from me when his guard was shot. Talk about the worst possible moment, and I bet the fool never handled a team before either."

"Where is he?"

Oh yes, Glokta wanted to know that, too, with every aching fibre in his body.

He could imagine the offhand motion that accompanied the next statement. "Broke his neck in the crash." A pause, broken by a hiss: "Unfortunately."

Then the mild voice, the one that he felt he should be able to place, the one that came with a fingerless glove that held him without causing panic from being restrained even in his half-awake state: "Keeping the assassins company. He almost did a better job of it than the lot of them together."

_Broken bodies rotting by the side of the road…_


	4. Chapter 4

Colonel Glokta lounged comfortably in his tent, enjoying the morning. He was served his breakfast by two of the prettiest serving girls they had in camp, and both of them looked at him with an air that suggested that they'd not mind spending the next night in his tent instead of with the other servants.

He was certainly considering it. The distraction would be welcome, to take his mind off of the pending skirmishes. Maybe better not, though. His ribs stung exquisitely with every breath he took.

As he was still contemplating his options, a careless movement of his broken arm sent a jolt of pain through him, and he cursed under his breath at his own clumsiness.

The room was clean, small without being cramped, and brightly lit by a set of three windows along the wall. Once the violent complaints of his arm settled down to a more bearable level, he started taking inventory.

He was alive – definitely.

All things considered, he was even reasonably comfortable. Some mornings his back and leg gave him more pain than the fresh injuries did now. Of course that would probably change if he tried to move.

Someone had gone to exceptional lengths to ensure that comfort.

His ribs were bound tightly, which enabled him to take shallow breaths without too much difficulty. His body wasn't all twisted up, probably largely owed to the fact that it was shored up with cushions on either side. They were everywhere, up and down his sides and even between his legs. Bad place. Very bad place. He should probably inform them – whoever 'they' were – that there was a risk of that one acquiring hard-to-remove stains of an undesirable kind. Some things had a way of spreading once they got into the bed.

On the other hand, he had to admit that if they had tried to lay him out straight – or what passed as straight for him - and keep him that way while he was sleeping, it was working surprisingly well. His back certainly was grateful and his left leg, slightly elevated under the blankets, was aching but didn't seem inclined to spasm.

His left arm, splinted from wrist to elbow, rested on a cushion of its own.

Oh yes, he was almost comfortable, and considering the battering he had taken in that coach, that was quite surprising. His shoulders felt bruised and the longer he was awake, the more he became aware of dull aches all over his body, but there was no cramping, no fiery stabs that ran up into his neck and down all the way into his toeless foot.

Still, he didn't think he would be leaving this bed anytime soon.

Turning his head carefully, he took in the rest of the sparsely furnished room.

Several moments passed before he realised that he was not alone.

A man was leaning against the wall by the door, so motionless that Glokta's eyes had slid right over him on their first pass along the walls.

Now that he had noticed him, Glokta focused on him.

"Where am I?" His throat felt somewhat sore and his jaw protested having to work. His tongue still felt awkward, but his words were clear enough.

"You're safe, Your Eminence." The man spoke in a soft voice that was very familiar to Glokta by now. He looked him up and down. Maybe his own age, but looking younger than him. No grey in his close-cropped curls yet, though his face bore the tell-tale traces of a life lived hard - the nose being a bit off-centre might have been owed to the swelling left over from a recent injury, but most of his other features appeared a little out of alignment as well. He was dressed all in soft leather. His left hand was bare, but the right one wore a kind of leather glove laced up along one side and cut off at the knuckles.

Glokta cleared his throat. "I wasn't aware 'safe' was a location."

"The guest quarters of Reddagger Keep." It was said as neutrally as if it had been nothing out of the ordinary at all, for all that it made Glokta stare as if he had said 'the king's own bedchamber'.

"The assassins' stronghold? You brought me to the assassins'—?" He shifted and managed to prop himself up on his uninjured elbow.

 _A body found floating by the docks_ …

Or, more likely, never found at all.

"Since when does the Assassins' Guild nurse their victims back to health?" The derisive tone in his voice was probably not the wisest choice, but he couldn't help it.

"We don't, Your Eminence," the man said, apparently undisturbed. "If the client had paid our price, you would be dead now. He thought to take his business elsewhere, where it would cost him less. The First likes a good joke, and so we got sent out to make sure they failed. Though I fear that Chrissen did not expect your Practical to interfere the way he did."

Neither had he, for that matter. He wondered if Pike had panicked or actually tried to kill him.

_A broken body by the side of the road…_

"Are you sure he is dead?"

The man shrugged. "If he wasn't dead after the crash –  which I doubt, considering his head was practically on backwards – he certainly was after we threw him onto the assassins' pyre. Fire kills anything."

In spite of the casual way in which it was said, Glokta had to suppress a shudder as he was reminded of the things that he had seen that were near-impossible to kill if not burnt to ashes. He remembered a thing with the body and face of a girl laughing as she burned.

"Why here?" Glokta felt himself tiring, but there were so many things he wanted to ask, that he needed to know before he could allow himself to rest. "Why not take me back to Adua, or some other place?"

"It would have been hard to protect you while you recovered under the eyes of the surgeons of Adua," the man pointed out. "We brought you here because it was safer.

One more question. Just one more question before he would allow his eyes to drift closed again. "How bad is it?" It was feeling worse by the minute – but then again, he always felt worse by the minute after waking up, though admittedly that usually had something to do with getting up and trying to walk.

"Bad enough to be exquisitely painful, but not life-threatening," was his answer.

Well, that was hardly a surprise – most of his life was exquisitely painful these days. He let his head fall back into the pillow – pillows, really, he had never seen such a ridiculously over-equipped bed before – and let his eyes close as the man went on: "I'm told you're welcome to remain our guest until you are sufficiently recovered to travel. If there's anything you need, just ask."

"A new set of teeth, a new leg and a new life," Glokta muttered, the response so automatic that it came all on its own.

He was asleep before the man responded.


	5. Chapter 5

Glokta forced his right hand to relax in a futile attempt to hide his body's unasked-for reaction. The sweat beading on his forehead was probably enough of a giveaway, though.

Saying that he hated it when hands other than his own touched his more vulnerable parts would have been an immense understatement. No matter how much he hated to admit it even to himself, it terrified him, calling back memories that made his entire body tremble in anticipation of excruciating pain.

There were reasons why he had hired the oldest servant still capable of dragging him from one place to the other when necessary. Barnam was old enough not to be a threat. Ardee, when she had insisted on taking care of him until her pregnancy had advanced too far to let her continue, had been bearable as well. He had never been tortured by a woman.

The surgeon's hands were gentle, but they looked large and strong enough to break bones as well as set them. The man himself was powerfully built and moving more like a soldier than a man of sedentary profession. His grey hair, cut to a short stubble over a sharply chiselled face, added to the military impression.

No matter how often Glokta told himself that nothing horrible was going to happen, his body would not believe that he was not going to have someone digging his thumbs into a spear wound, tearing at skin and muscle, any moment.

He might have laughed at himself if he had had the mental capacity to think his reasoning through in addition to fighting down the panic. The fact that those were a surgeon's hands on his body wasn't reassuring either. If anything, it drove up his expectation of pain. The surgeons' attempts to put his tortured body back together after his return from the Gurkish prison had rivalled some of the torture sessions in intensity of pain.

The blankets were folded back across his body and twitched into place.

He managed to relax a little when the surgeon moved away from the bed.

"Well?" he asked. "Am I going to live?"

The surgeon, who had performed this examination without saying a word, hooked over a chair and, turning it around, sat on it astride, his arms resting comfortably on the low backrest. "There was never any doubt of that." He spoke in a low and neutral voice, as if talking about the weather or relaying some piece of news or another that wasn't very remarkable. It was the same tone he had used upon entering the room earlier, when he had asked his permission to conduct an examination. Glokta had grunted a curt agreement. It wasn't like he was in a position to refuse, and at least the man had had the decency to ask at all. That was more than he could have said for a great many other surgeons he had had in his life.

At least he wasn't talking down at him very much now that he was sitting. One of the things Glokta hated most about being stuck in bed was that everyone ended up talking down at him, literally as well as otherwise, turning him back into a mere object to be used and abused at their discretion.

With a non-committal sound, he motioned for the man to continue.

"Your injuries will take a while to heal, Your Eminence" the surgeon ventured. "A little patience is all you need."

He made a face. "My body has taught me patience."

A nod, acknowledging his words without turning into a display of sympathy. "Your kneecap is only cracked – I am quite certain that what trouble it will give you at a change of the weather later will hardly be noticeable over the clamour the rest of your leg already sets up at those times."

Glokta could not suppress a wince at the thought.

"Your ankle isn't that bad, even though it looks terrible right now. It'll be healed by the time you're able to get out of bed again. Your ribs will heal on their own, and your arm has been set well, so I expect that it will not give you trouble for long either. I suggest that you enjoy our hospitality from your bed until it does – you will find walking very difficult while you cannot put any weight on the arm or the leg." He paused for a moment, observing Glokta's reaction before he went on. "I'd very much like to know for how long you've been walking on a dislocated hip, though. That was not a recent injury."

It also was the first he had heard of doing that. He shrugged. "Damned if I know," he answered truthfully. "Anywhere up to seven years, I assume."

"You'll have to be careful with that," the surgeon said. "It's back in place now, but it is likely to remain a weak spot."

That drew a snort from Glokta. "I have many of those already."

The surgeon inclined his head. "I imagine. I must say, I'm not impressed with my predecessors' work, especially on that leg."

"They did what they could." The line sounded rehearsed even to Glokta's own ears. "There's only so much you can do with injuries as bad as mine. Two years of torture aren't easy on a body. No one expected me to ever walk again at all."

"I'd've liked to see that leg when the injuries were fresher," the surgeon answered slowly, a trace of that interest Glokta despised so much creeping into his voice. "Might have been able to do a little more then."

Glokta's voice had turned decidedly cooler now. "Do you see injuries like these often, Master…?"

"You can call me Lan," the surgeon told him. "And I am certain that you know what kind of profession our guild members engage in. It carries certain risks – It isn't rare for one to return in something other than prime condition. Although," he chuckled, "I admit that most limit themselves to one or two injuries at a time rather than showing up with an entire collection of them."


	6. Chapter 6

Glokta was lying in his bed, reading. The assassins' guild appeared to have quite a respectable library at its disposal. From the moment he had asked if there was anything for him to keep his mind occupied with, since sleeping and choking down soup did not seem like quite enough to fill his days, they had provided him with a prime choice of books.

He felt as if he had read more in the last couple of days than in the last ten years combined.

A knock on his door interrupted him.

"Come!" he called out, wincing slightly as the deeper breath he had to take to raise his voice caused an unpleasant twinge in his injured ribs.

The woman who entered was unknown to him. She was tall and moved with the same careless grace that was ever-present among the inhabitants of the Keep. Her most distinguishing feature was the bright red of her hair, pulled into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Like everyone he had seen since his arrival here, she was dressed in plain leather and loose linen that did not inhibit movement.

"I bring bad tidings," she announced, and he revised his initial impression. Not entirely unknown.

He had heard that voice before, though then it had been pitched to be impersonal. Giving commands and scolding the men and women who had brought him in.

"And what would those be?" Then, after a moment's pause, he added: "First of the Assassin's Guild."

She betrayed no surprise, though he hadn’t truly expected it. With the career she must have behind her, she had to have learned to control every part of her body, including her facial expression, every moment of the day. He estimated her to be in her late thirties. Young to be the head of a guild, maybe, especially as a woman, but who was he to talk? After all, he was a cripple who had made it to Arch Lector at thirty-five.

"You may call me Rinn," she told him calmly. "Since you are not of my guild, there is no need for formality." He wasn't given any chance to respond to that, as she went on immediately. "News has just reached us that the Arch Lector Sand dan Glokta has been killed in an unfortunate coach accident, along with his driver, guard and the practical who travelled with him. A successor is probably being appointed as we speak."

That made him stare at her, though not exactly open-mouthed. He was too conscious of the horrible state of his teeth to permit himself that kind of a lapse. He could have kicked himself in the arse if the condition of his leg had allowed any such exercise. Of course his disappearance wouldn't have remained unnoticed. Of course no one in his right mind would have considered the option that he was alive and being taken care of somewhere by people who were better known for helping others to find an untimely grave than for keeping them from it.

Hearing it, though, made it real.

He struggled up into a sitting position, ignoring the stab of his ribs and the twinge that started in his back as it left the support of his cushions. "I need to return," he declared. "Can you get me clothes and transportation? I can pay—"

Pay! By the time he got back they would probably already have been through his things to send them to his mother. If they did that, they would find his stash of gems. They would wonder how the cripple had come by such a fortune. Would his dealings with Bayaz be uncovered? Their on-going connection? What would it mean for him?

"Easy, Sand dan Glokta." She stepped forward as he started to turn sideways to shove his legs over the edge of the bed, injured or not. "Do not forget that there are still people in Adua who were willing to pay well to have you killed."

"Not well enough, apparently."

That earned him a slow smile. "Very true. Nevertheless, they do have people out there who would be more than glad to collect the prize they put on your head. How long are you going to live if you return to Adua like that, Sand dan Glokta?"

_A body found floating by the docks…_

He stopped moving, then cautiously lowered his upper body back onto the bed. There was no point in causing himself more pain.

"Will you at least send someone to tell them I'm still alive?"

Her eyebrows went up. "If that is what you truly wish," she agreed.

Was it? For a moment, he allowed himself to pursue a different line of thought. What if he simply let them believe that he had died in that coach? He would be free. Free of the king, free of Adua, and, first and foremost, free of Bayaz. Could he start over once again, without the ties that bound him to the Magi?

The idea almost made him laugh. He would never be free of his crippled, twisted body. He would never be able to take on a different identity, even if he wished. He was too recognisable. One person who had met him before seeing him again would be enough.

"I cannot promise you that they will believe it, though," she went on. "Not without evidence. And I will not have people stomp through here merely to verify that you are, in fact, still alive."

He considered that. Truth be told, he would rather not anyone came to reassure himself of his condition. Where only minutes ago, he would have been willing to race right back into Adua, broken bones and all, his determination to survive had already taken over again.

Better, then, to wait out the time until his injuries were healed here; to return to Adua then, and see how to continue from there. Maybe Bayaz would release him if he could no longer use him as the Arch Lector.

Maybe Bayaz would send his own assassin.

_A body found floating by the docks…_

More likely no body found at all, because Bayaz' assassin happened to be an Eater. At least he'd have the satisfaction of knowing that he would not make for a very delicious meal. Nothing fed on soup and porridge alone could be tasty.

He'd have to deal with Bayaz and whatever was thrown his way at some point, but he better make sure that he was in a shape to deal with it when the situation arose. Or well, as much as he ever was, these days.

"No," he decided. "Don't even try. I will take care of it when I am well again."

She inclined her head slightly. "Very well. I trust our hospitality agrees with you so far?"

"Thank you. Your servants have been very kind to me." They were certainly patient enough when it took him forever to choke down his meals, and the cooking was better than Barnam's at least.

Her laughter took him aback at first, but she hurried to explain even before he could ask: "We have no servants here, Sand dan Glokta. Everyone living in the keep who isn't a guest is either a Guild member or a trainee. We take care of each other."

No servants. That meant… "You mean to say that the people who brought my food, changed the sheets of my bed, washed me…" cleaned off my shit, he almost said, because of course he had had one of those nights the second day of his stay. For some reason, though, he found himself reluctant to mention those more embarrassing long-term effects of the torture he had gone through. "You mean to tell me that all those people were _assassins_?"

"That is what I said," she confirmed, coming closer until she was standing right next to the bed. Looking _down_ at him. "Considering that the trainees are not generally allowed access to the guest quarters. Do you have a problem with that? Because if so, I fear it is not something that can be helped. I'm not going to hire outsiders because you do not agree with our line of work."

It was his turn to laugh now, though his amusement was cut short by a sharp reminder from his healing ribs. "I am hardly in a place to complain about people's chosen careers. Torturer, remember?" Something else occurred to him. "What about the surgeon?"

"Lan hasn't taken any assignments for years," she explained. "He's staying here with the instructors and the retired guild members to make sure he's at hand if someone needs his services. He used to be in quite high demand in his younger days, though. Intimate knowledge of anatomy befits an assassin as much as it does a surgeon."

Or a torturer.

"I may never be able to repay you for what you're doing for me," Glokta admitted, changing the subject and getting back to the problem of his gems most likely being lost. He could probably get some money from his mother if he returned to her, but would it come close to covering what they would charge?

Rinn shrugged and gracefully lowered herself onto the edge of his bed, where she seemed to be quite comfortable. Too comfortable for his taste. "I'm not going to invoice you. If you want to pay us back for your treatment and care, spend some time at the fencing courts. Our trainees are educated in many areas, and it would not be amiss to have a couple proficient in fencing with steels as you were known to be. You could work off whatever you perceive as your debt as a trainer."

"I?" he sputtered. "I most certainly could not.”

Her eyes were fastened on his face unrelentingly. "You were the best."

"'Were' is the operative word there," he spat. "Has it escaped your notice that I'm a bit crippled these days?" It certainly hadn't escaped his. Even after all these days spent in bed, a dull ache as familiar to him as an old friend still outlined parts of his body – and that was ignoring the sharper pain from his broken ribs, aggravated again by his earlier resolve to get out of bed.

"Indeed it has not," she returned. "But though your active fencing days may be over, you could still teach." Something about her posture had changed, alerting him that their conversation had just taken a turn – though where that turn led, he could not say.

He shook his head as empathically as he dared. "I will not."

For some reason that brought a smile to her face. "Now we're getting closer," she claimed. "It's not that you can't but that you won't. And why won't you, Sand dan Glokta?"

She kept using his name that way, carefully putting down all four syllables.

"It's not who I am."

Her eyebrows went up. "And an Inquisitor, a torturer – that is who you are?"

A shrug. "It's what I'm good at. What I can still do."

"What keeps you from doing something else? You see, I am not known for passing up on an opportunity, and acquiring a fencing instructor of your calibre, even for a short time, is quite an opportunity." She watched him as he carefully moved his head from side to side, his face an unreadable mask. "So let me ask you a different question. What could I offer that would make you consider it. What do _you_ want?"

Wordlessly, he stared into her eyes as he mentally went over the litany that he had repeated so often in the last years. _I want back my teeth. I want back my leg. I want back my life._

"Only you can take your life back," she stated, startling him as he realised that he had spoken aloud. "I do not have the knowledge to give you back full use of your leg. Even if I had, it would have to be a shared effort. But let me see your teeth."

After a moment spent letting her see his sneer instead, he obeyed, giving her a good look at the sad remains of his teeth. While he still had half of them, they were utterly useless to him – where those below had been left, those above had been removed and vice versa. Half his teeth, and not a one was still of any use to him.

She turned his head from side to side with her hand gentle but firm on his jaw, inspecting the damage in detail before she let go of him again.

"Bring me an apple that I can eat," he told her. "A real one, not all mashed up."

"You will do what I tell you to do." Her voice was cool and hard, with the edge that he had heard in it once before. "Just as you would expect a student to do what you tell him to do if you _were_ a fencing teacher. Then you may have your apple yet."

Without another word she stood and left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

Glokta was left staring at the ceiling. The thought of him teaching the art of fencing to trainee assassins was ridiculous – about as ridiculous as the expectation that he would ever eat anything other than soup, porridge, gruel or the like again.


	7. Chapter 7

Passing the tiny knife over the ivory surface, she removed another minute chip from the material.

It was slow, tedious work, demanding full concentration to get it just right.

She wasn't doing it for the first time, though.

Disguises were essential in their line of work, and while most of them had some skill in producing them, she prided herself in having fashioned some of the most convincing ones that had ever left the keep.

Sometimes, a set of false teeth to wear on top of the original ones was just the thing to complete a disguise. At other times, teeth lost by accident or in a fight left a gap too distinctive to be kept. Anything that made a person easier to recognise was bad for them.

Most of the times, each of them took care of his or her own disguises, but everyone needed things to occupy themselves with while they were staying at the keep.

Glokta must surely have thought she had gone entirely mad when she had returned with two half-circles cut from the thick, fleshy leaves of the spongy yet firm plants that grew all over the hills.

She had used them to get a print of his remaining teeth – one for the top, one for the bottom row. The inquisitor had stared at her through the procedure, but he had submitted to it wordlessly.

Filling the resulting indentations gave her a model of the teeth that remained in his upper and lower jaw respectively to work with. Mounting them on a hinge so they would close just right turned out to be a bigger challenge. Usually, she would have asked him to bite on a strip of thick leather just soft enough to take the tooth prints, and used that to align her models to match the original.

In Glokta's case, the very problem that kept him from chewing his food also prevented that approach from working.

After thinking it over for a while, she went for two strips of leather mounted on either side of a thin but stiff metal plate – she'd have to make some allowances for the bigger distance between the two sides, but for the moment, a perfect result wasn't required.

Adequate would be quite sufficient.

She discarded the blade and took up a file to add detail, then carefully fitted the result of her work into one of the gaps her model still sported. A bit more trimming here and there, and it would fit well enough.

The ivory blocks she worked on were always pierced before she started to give them shape so she could thread in pieces of wire later – much better to go about it that way than to risk breaking the finished piece while trying to drill through it. She used the finest, strongest and purest steel wire she could get her hands on – expensive but worth the money. Based on her experience, it held for a long time.

Inserting a length of that wire into the piece she had just finished, she carefully shaped the loops on either side and fitted them over the teeth adjacent to the gap she was going to bridge on the model to anchor it in place. Once that was done, she took the set of false teeth between two fingers and wriggled it slightly, checking the tightness of the fit. Some movement didn't matter. She'd tighten those loops better when the pieces were actually in place where they were supposed to stay.

Satisfied with her work, she took up the next raw block.

The missing molars on either side of Glokta's mouth presented the biggest problem. He'd have to do with a single one on the left. That was all she could securely place with a tooth on only one side to anchor it to. On the right, the last tooth – hard to reach at the very back of his mouth - had been chiselled away only incompletely, leaving a sharp-edged spike standing that, while no good for chewing food, probably provided ample opportunity for Glokta to cut his tongue on and cause him further discomfort – but also offered a potential second anchor. They'd have to see how well it worked out.

She took the measurements for the next gap and started whittling away on her block.

*

"Ready?"

He grumbled a vague affirmative. Watching her set out her tools made him shudder involuntarily. He felt sweat bead on his skin again. Some of those things looked too reminiscent of certain tools of his trade that he had been introduced to him by giving him a first-hand experience of their functions. He had no idea what she was going to do to him, and he would be damned if he admitted to it – or the fear – and asked, but it was getting harder by the second to suppress his body's desire to tremble in anticipation of pain to come. He clenched his fists hard to keep his hands still, and almost yelped at the pain in his left arm.

"Good," Rinn said, either oblivious to his reaction or ignoring it. "Then lean back, relax and open your mouth so I can get at those teeth…"

Closing his eyes so he wouldn't have to watch whatever she was going to do, he obeyed.

Of course he did not expect any improvement of his situation to come from this. He had been told often enough that there was nothing that could be done. He hoped that whatever she was going to try wasn't going to be too painful, and tried to console himself with the knowledge that she couldn't make his situation any worse, no matter what she did. He was already unable to bite or chew his food – that was as bad as it could get.

It took forever – or at least it felt like it. He refused to look, even when he heard her make sounds of satisfaction or annoyance. At least whatever she was doing there wasn't very painful, beyond the occasional easy-to-ignore twinge in his gums and the fact that his jaw started to ache more and more as time passed.

"There you go," she announced finally.

She withdrew her hands and he closed his mouth with an audible _clack_ that sent a jolt through him. He hadn't heard that sound – or felt his teeth stop short of his empty gums – in years. His eyes flew open and he stared in disbelief as he ran his tongue along the front of his mouth, probing for the gaps in vain.

His mouth filled with saliva a lot faster than it should, and he swallowed convulsively a few times.

"That's normal," she noted without even being asked. "And it'll pass in a little while. Mirror?"

Without waiting for his answer, she held one out to him. He took it in a trembling hand, unsure if he wanted to know. Maybe it was better not to, and to keep up the illusion she had somehow created for him a little while longer…

He may have been many things, but he'd never been a coward and never would be.

Before he could reconsider, he turned over the mirror and stared at his reflection –

\-- and a full set of teeth between his lips, some a little lighter in colour than others, but not so much that it would be noticeable to the casual observer. He had to swallow again before he could continue his scrutiny. He found the wire rings holding the fake teeth in place against his remaining ones. Those, too, would be invisible unless he deliberately pulled back his lips far enough to expose them. He permitted himself a lopsided grin.

He had his teeth back.

Visually, at least.

"Do they—" he started to ask, the words feeling and sounding strange as the tip of his tongue connected with an obstacle where there had been none before. He tried again, slowly and enunciating each syllable carefully "Do they work?"

She had spent the time that he had taken to examine her work putting away her tools. Now she turned to him with a smile that radiated satisfied superiority. "Find out for yourself," she suggested, pulling a fresh apple from her pocket and polishing it against her coat quickly before tossing it at him.

Her aim was good, and he caught the fruit easily in his right hand, but he still hesitated.

What if he tried biting into it and it _didn't_ work? What if those fake teeth weren't sharp enough to actually use, or if they fell out the moment any pressure was applied to them?

Not a coward – he was not a coward, and he was not going to be afraid to find out, he told himself.

But he was, and he was glad that she was looking elsewhere and thus didn't see his hand shake as he lifted the fruit.

It certainly looked delicious. It made his mouth water more than it already was, if that was even possible. Normal, she had said? How did she know? How often had she done this? He'd known that the dentists in Adua were quite useless, but he hadn't been aware of the full scope of their uselessness until just now.

It didn't really matter, he told himself. If she turned back towards him before he had tried, she'd know he was scared.

Taking a deep breath, he brought the apple up to his mouth and took a good bite out of it.

He felt pressure build against his gums as his teeth went through the fruit.

It felt strange.

It felt wonderful.

His mouth was full of apple, and even though his mind was too astonished to react, his body remembered what it was supposed to do and started chewing the generous chunk he had just bitten off.

He blinked away tears as he swallowed a mouthful of apple and took another bite. This was pure bliss, a pleasure he had not thought he’d ever experience again, no matter how long he lived.

By the time he had finished, his jaw was starting to ache from the unusual exercise.

 _Get used to it_ , he told it silently. _No more soup. No more porridge. Ever._

She was watching him, he noticed. Since when had she been watching him? He had to say something, tell her something…

"Thank you." The words felt strange as once more his tongue brushed against teeth where there had not been any. They were also entirely inadequate to express his feelings, but he found himself at a loss for any other. He could only hope that Rinn understood the depth of his gratitude went that far beyond a simple thanks.

That was when he realised that he had his end of the bargain to hold up – the end that he had thought he could safely expect never to have to put into practice.

"I'll pay up once I'm able to leave this bed," he promised. "I haven't forgotten what the deal was."


	8. Chapter 8

Glokta sat by the side of a fencing court, watching the matches as they played themselves out there and taking mental notes, just as he had for most of the afternoon.

He was expected to pick his future students based on who he thought most likely to fully master the steels to Contest level. It had come as something of a surprise when he realised that not everyone who came to perform for him in hopes of being invited back at some later time was a trainee – and the trainees were easy enough to tell from the assassins by the simple, undyed breeches and tunics they wore.

It hadn't been his first surprise that day, though.

His schedule of lying in bed and doing nothing but read and eat had changed just after lunch with the suggestion that he come outside and have a look at the sword skills of his potential student body _now_. He had declined, pointing out that as he was unable to put any weight on his leg or arm, there was no way that he could oblige.

Not quite five minutes later, he had been looking at a set of clothing held out to him along with an offer to carry him outside so he could sit by the fencing court and enjoy the sun a little while he watched. It became quite clear to him that they were not going to give him any reason to hope that anyone might forget what he owed.

Glokta hadn’t been too happy with the idea. Being at their mercy, giving them the power to take and leave him where they would, did not appeal to him in the least. He had quickly banished all thought of the things that might end up happening. He was at their mercy anyway. Nothing would keep them from simply picking him up and putting him wherever they pleased – he certainly couldn't.

 _A starved body found by the side of a lonely mountain path_ …

He didn’t have to make it any harder on himself than it already was, which left him with only one choice .

They had helped him dress in clothes very similar to those their trainees wore. Both trousers and tunic were loose and comfortable, and not nearly as difficult to put on in his current condition as he had feared.

As they ventured outside, he realised that the building that held the 'guest quarters' they had installed him in was, in fact, mostly a front. Built into a narrow mountain pass, it effectively blocked access to the valley behind it – a valley that held a thriving village. He wondered how many uninitiated people had ever had the opportunity to lay eyes on this place. How many of those had left it again still alive?

_A bloated body washed ashore by the river, mutilated beyond recognition…_

At least while they wanted his expertise in sword-fighting, they had more reason to keep him alive than to kill him.

They had placed him in a padded chair right by the fence, his bad leg propped up on a stool some trainee had been sent to fetch the moment they arrived, a bowl of fruit within easy reach of his good hand.

That almost made him smile. They certainly knew how to remind him what he was doing this for.

With immense pleasure, he thought back to last night's dinner. Once, he would have considered a meal of bread, no matter how freshly baked, cheese and sausage to be quite bland, something he might eat while travelling. Now, it seemed like a veritable feast, every bite to be savoured. He had gone to sleep with his jaw aching from exertion but happier than he had been in a long time.

News travelled to the kitchens fast, it appeared. The morning had brought him eggs and bacon. Lunch had come in the form of meat with vegetables. He would have to be careful not to grow fat on all the wonderful food he could eat again now. His leg could barely bear his weight as it was.

The sun had certainly been pleasant, and though his circle of students would be small if he was to pick only those that stood even a theoretical chance of ever competing in the Contest, he had seen worse fencing in his life.

Still, even with the chair's backrest reclining slightly and plenty of padding around him, sitting up for so long was taking its toll. By now, every breath made itself felt by a stab in his ribs and every minute he remained in his current position worsened the still-dull ache in his back.

"I think it's time for me to go back inside," he said, hoping that the man who had brought him out and stood aside somewhere at his back was still there. He was starting to suspect that they were somehow taking pleasure out of little things like staying just out of his field of vision while not needed and leaving him to wonder if they had simply abandoned him.

"Certainly."

Glokta couldn't help but start at the voice, but at least he could stop himself from twisting around to look at the speaker. His neck gave a warning twinge anyway.

The assassins moved much too silently for his peace of mind. He knew that voice well by now and it did not belong to the man who had brought him outside earlier. "So, do you fence, Mikal?" He did his best to sound as if he had known of the switch all along. Maybe some of the assassins' skill at pretending would rub off on him before he left them again.

Of course that would not do him any good at all if he left them cold and stiff, ready to be eaten by whatever creatures roamed these mountains.

 _A mutilated body found at the bottom of a gorge_ …

He lifted his leg off of its support and gingerly bent the knee as far as he dared.

"Not me," he heard the assassin at his back. "I know which end is meant to be stuck in the enemy, but my skills lie elsewhere."

"And where would that be?"

_Stupid, Glokta, very stupid. Why don't you ask them for all their guild secrets to make sure they can't let you leave this place alive?_

The tall man stepped forward, and Glokta saw the glint of sun reflected by a knife hefted easily in his half-gloved hand. "Name your target."

Glokta hesitated. It wasn’t a dagger the man was holding, but a sleek, narrow blade shaped to stab, not cut. He had little experience with throwing knives. They weren't something you usually encountered in the army, and certainly not in the Inquisition's dungeons.

What would the assassin do if he picked something so far that it was sure to be out of range, or so close that it could be considered an insult?

Mikal seemed to realise this predicament. "How about the third fence post from the corner?" he suggested.

"That sounds fine." It didn't, not really. Those fence posts were narrow and not too high. They seemed to make awfully flimsy targets, but it wasn't as if he had anything else to offer.

At least if he missed it would have been the assassin's own idea.

Glokta hardly saw the snap of Mikal's arm that sent the small blade hurtling through the air until it firmly embedded itself in the wood. The hilt didn't even seem to vibrate, though that, surely, was due to the distance.

"Excuse me. I'll be right back." Without waiting for a reply, Mikal went to retrieve his weapon.

Left alone for the moment, Glokta considered what he had just seen. Even without knowing a lot about the weapon and technique in question, he was quite certain that that had been an admirable throw. Were they all that good?

They had to be.

What would they charge to permanently remove someone like – oh, say, Bayaz, the first of the Magi?

It sounded like that would be an expensive pleasure. Would what remained of his gems be enough to pay for it?

He allowed himself to entertain that thought for a moment, before reality caught up with him again. He didn't have those gems anymore. He didn’t have anything anymore, because as far as everyone outside of this place was concerned, he was dead.

Unless Bayaz had managed to send someone to steal them back in time, the gems were now most likely in the possession of his Highness the King, who was probably under the watchful eye of the Magi's new lapdog.

Did that mean that he was free?

The thought didn't bring him the pleasure he had thought it would, probably because he was all too aware of the truth of the matter. He would never be free for as long as both he and Bayaz were alive – and that brought him full circle to his initial thought. What would it cost to change that?

The assassin returned, his throwing knife safely hidden somewhere on his body again. He smirked down at Glokta. "Still want to go back inside?"

Glokta nodded. Even if he hadn't wanted to, he really needed to. His knee was throbbing, his back was aching worse with every minute, providing background noise for the pain that swelled and ebbed with the rhythm of his breathing, and his thigh was threatening to cramp even though it hadn't had to bear any weight.

A moment later he was lifted up just as if he weighed nothing at all. The sudden change of position was enough to make a muscle in his back spasm, and he winced as the pain went from dull to sharp-edged.

 _It could be worse_ , he told himself. _He could have made you crawl back over there on your own._

They almost made it without mishap.

At the last moment, already in sight of his bed, Glokta's body decided that it was time to remind him that there were certain bodily functions he no longer had any control over.

It was one thing to wake up in the morning and find that he had soiled his bed in his sleep. It was an entirely different one to have it happen while he was awake, knowing it was happening and unable to stop it.

"I think I need a bath," Glokta muttered

The assassin looked at him in surprise for a moment, before comprehension dawned on his face as he caught a whiff of the smell spreading out from his charge now.

"You couldn't have just said something?" he asked, his voice hanging somewhere between amusement and irritation. "We could have stopped by the latrine for a moment, you know."

He had thought his capacity for being embarrassed by the things his body did had been exhausted years ago, but it had been so long since he had had to explain it.

"No, I couldn't." He hated the defensive tone that had crept into his voice. "I can't control it – the torturers in a Gurkish prison made sure of that. By the time I feel it coming it's too late."

Instead of answering, Mikal put him down on the bed, turning him on his right side so he wouldn't end up lying in his own mess. "I'll get some water. I don't think Lan would appreciate it if I stuck you in a bath just like that. Don't go anywhere – I'll be right back."

That last comment drew a snort of derision from Glokta. Don't go anywhere, indeed. Where would he go – and how?


	9. Chapter 9

The only good thing about it was that he knew for sure that he would not wake to an unpleasant surprise the next morning.

He had to be thankful for those little things in life. It was all he had.

Spending a few hours outside in the sun had been a little thing to be thankful for, too, even though Glokta was hesitant to admit to himself that it hadn't been an unpleasant experience. He certainly wasn't eager to share his knowledge of fencing – was he? Surely all it would do would be to tear open the old wound that had bled so profusely when he had fist realised that he would never return to his career, never take up the steels again, never measure his skills with another swordsman again. It had taken a long time to stop hurting.

Or maybe it never had, and he had merely learned to ignore it when he could and live with it when he couldn't, like so many other things.

A knock tore him from his thoughts, and he jumped at the opportunity of a distraction.

"Come in!"

The door opened, revealing a visitor he had never seen before.

He was a good deal older – and a good deal fatter – than anyone else Glokta had seen in this place before. A patch covered his right eye, or possibly its empty socket.

Glokta gestured to the chair. "Whatever you've come for, have a seat. Looking up at people gets exhausting."

"Mikal sends me," the man explained as he obeyed. "I'm the local pharmacist, you see."

"Pharmacist?" What was he supposed to do with a pharmacist?

The man favoured him with a cool smile. "The man who makes sure everyone has just the right thing to coat their blades with, slip into someone's tea or take to avoid being captured alive."

That may not have been the usual definition of 'pharmacist', but it was certainly fitting.

"And what does that have to do with me?" Glokta wanted to know.

The pharmacist studied him for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether he truly didn't know. "He told me what happened earlier."

Wonderful. By this time tomorrow, there probably wouldn't be a single person in this place who didn't know.

"So now you've come to put me out of my misery?"

He hadn't meant it to be funny, though apparently it greatly amused the other man.

"In a way," he laughed, leaning forward and putting a small box on the table by Glokta's bed, pushing it until it slid into his reach.

"What is that?" Suspicion was evident in Glokta's voice. "Poison?"

His visitor laughed again. "For most things, it's only a matter of quantity before they become poison. But don't worry – you'd be sick of the taste long before you got down enough to poison yourself."

When it became clear that a mute glare was all the reaction Glokta intended to show to the pharmacist's amusement, he went on. "No, this is more the kind of thing I'd slip into someone's drink if I needed them gone from the room and safely locked in the privy for a while."

"And what am I supposed to do with it?" He tried to sound uninvolved, but a thought had started to take root in Glokta's mind. Before he could stop himself, he had pushed open the lid of the box and glanced inside. Its contents looked like dried berries. He folded the lid shut again with a snap, just as if he had only been toying with it. "I don't need any more … incidents."

"But you might want to be in charge of when they happen. I would suggest taking a spoonful in time before you go to bed." The pharmacist still sounded amused at Glokta's effort to remain unexcited. "And go sit on the privy afterwards. It should take about thirty minutes to take full effect, but I'd recommend being in position after twenty, just in case. Take a good book along, 'cause you'll be busy for a while, but you'll be able to sleep without fear of waking in a mess the next morning. You may want to experiment a bit with how many days you can skip in between, but once you get into a rhythm, you should be pretty well in control of the when and where."

He stood and, not giving Glokta any opportunity to answer, continued. "Drop by in time before you run out and I'll get you more. Or pick your own – they grow all over the place. Now if you'll excuse me? I have some actual work to do."

With that, he turned and slipped out of the door without even waiting for Glokta to decide whether he wanted to say thank you or not.


	10. Chapter 10

"That'll do for today," Glokta announced as he carefully levered himself to his feet. His leg protested being expected to work, worse so than it usually did.

 _Shut up, or I will have you cut off_ , he thought at it viciously.

His leg was unimpressed by the threat, his thigh cramping painfully when he tried to put some weight on it.

He was walking again now - or what counted as walking for him in any case – , leaning onto an actual crutch instead of a cane for the time being, to keep most of the strain off of the lower part of his arm. In spite of the discomfort, he appreciated the freedom it gave him.

He had been up and about regularly after that first trip to the fencing court, but always with the help of one of his caretakers – or guardians, as he had come to suspect. While he had still been unable to handle any kind of support or put down his left foot without wanting to scream from the pain, one of them had always been at hand to serve as a living crutch to help him around.

While it had been at their nagging and prodding that he had ventured out to begin with, he couldn't shake the feeling that his eager helpers were just as focused on making sure he didn't venture into places he wasn't wanted by the Guild as they were on enabling him to leave his bed in the manner both least embarrassing and least painful to him. He didn't quite understand why they didn't just let him lie there until he was sufficiently healed, without continually trying to convince him that he wanted to go to this place or that.

His suspicion was further supported when, once he had been able to get around on his own, he still found himself accompanied wherever he went.

As he tested his leg again carefully, grimacing at the pain shooting down into his mutilated foot but satisfied that the knee held up, he saw his most frequent guard move into position from the corner of his eye.

"What are you, Mikal?" he asked without turning his head, his voice betraying only idle curiosity. "My shadow?"

"Something like that," the other man answered, stepping forward to place himself by Glokta's side. It was one of his unique habits to stay back far enough to be ignored easily if Glokta wished, but move closer the moment he acknowledged his presence.

With a snort, Glokta started moving in his awkward, uneven gait, his left foot barely clearing the ground. Instead of heading back towards the guest quarters, though, he now made his way across the square adjacent to the fencing court.

The rear part of the village was built on sloping ground, the buildings placed on terraces cut from the rock, the path leading up to them interrupted by several sets of three or four wide steps.

While he hated them as much as any other stairs he had met since his release from the Gurkish prison, Glokta had made it a point to try to figure out which parts of the area precisely the guild members considered off-limits to him. Every day, he forced himself to explore another small portion of the mountain valley they had set up their village in, ignoring the clamour of his leg and back as long as he could. Now that he had been just about everywhere on level ground, he could either give up or explore the higher parts – which meant braving those stairs.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked Mikal as they walked, slowly, towards the first three steps.

"I have no Target to work on right now," the assassin answered, as if that explained everything.

Glokta shook his head carefully, stopped by a warning twinge in his neck. "I didn't mean you specifically. Why haven't you just thrown me out? I'm obviously no longer in need of being nursed around the clock."

He glared down at the stairs in front of him before resolutely digging in his crutch to lean on as he moved his good foot up onto the first step. "You need a banister on these."

"Why bother with a stationary one when you have a mobile banister right next to you?" Mikal asked with a chuckle, offering his arm for support.

Glokta ignored him, climbing the first set of steps slowly but determinedly, his teeth closed around his bottom lip.

Three steps only, and he was feeling sweat bead on his skin by the time he had reached the top one. That was bad even for his standards. He hadn't quite realised just how badly out of shape he was.

With an inward growl at his own body, he started moving towards the next set.

"Because you're like us," Mikal said, and Glokta took a moment to realise that he was answering his earlier question as if there had not been an interruption of several minutes as he was scaling those steps.

In spite of ambling along slowly, the assassin reached the stairs before Glokta. Instead of walking on, though, he turned around and, in the same smooth movement, sat down on them as if they had come up here specifically to enjoy the sun.

Glokta's back gave a threatening spasm at the thought of climbing more steps.

Grudgingly, he decided that it was wiser to join the other man than try to get any farther right now.

He glanced over to the fencing yard, where some of his students were still going through their drill even though he had declared the lesson ended for the day.

"Hardly," he decided.

Mikal laughed. "Not like _them_ ," he pointed out, adding after a second: "Or most of them, in any case. They're in it for the thrill, or to satisfy some desire or another, or whatever – they'll never be anything more than average at best. But some of us – Rinn and Lan, Chrissen, Vilya and Lissa, Sorin, me – we're another matter."

A grunt was Glokta's only answer. He had nothing in common with the assassins' elite – which he assumed Mikal was referring to – and neither did he have any desire to. He was – had been – the Arch Lector after all, head of the inquisition, an organisation officially dedicated to bringing down criminals, not putting itself on the same level with them. Though, he had to admit, it was hard to see the difference more often than not, and the inquisition certainly was not above bending the rules when it served its purposes.

Unwilling to think of the matter any more, he pushed himself back to his feet and turned. If he made it up those next three steps, he had some more or less level ground to walk on again on either side. He'd at least see if Mikal let him walk past the cottages to his left all the way to the edge of the village. Tomorrow, he could try those on his right.

His companion joined him again wordlessly, stopping when Glokta did as he had to catch his breath and wait for the burning in his leg and arse to subside a little before he could walk on.

"Have you considered exercising a little to help your body along?" Mikal asked.

Glokta favoured him with a scathing look. "I'm still recovering from a coach accident," he pointed out acerbically. "Besides which, my body's broken even at the best of times. Some Gurkish torturers made sure of that."

"I'm surprised you just accepted that, Sand dan Glokta," Mikal drawled, as always using his full name while none of the assassins ever gave more than their first one. Glokta had to admit that it was quite effective in reminding him that he was the outsider here.

A shrug of his twisted shoulders sent another stab of pain down his back and up his neck, making him flinch. "There was nothing left but to accept it."

"If you'll take my advice…" Mikal started slowly, falling into step next to the former Arch Lector again.

"There's no point in it," Glokta declined before he could speak any further. "I did what I could. Pretending I'd get any better than I was would only be a waste of time and energy. Better to accept the situation and make the best of it." He had wanted to sound indifferent, but the words came out bitter, and made the feeling of loss catch up with him once again. It wasn't quite as keen as during the early days, though, when he had kept repeating to himself that he was lucky to be alive and needed to make the best of his new situation, that if he gave up on himself, the Gurkish would still have won – or at least he told himself so. The emotional pain must have dulled since, even though the physical one hardly had.

Mikal pretended not to have heard. "There's a pond at the edge of the village," he pointed out instead. "It's easier to move in water than on land when your body's weakened. You might want to try—"

"I know there's a pond!" Glokta snarled. He had talked to his students about it, pointing out that someone training for the contest would not be limited to practicing with the steels. There were other means of training to improve stamina and balance as well, and the former included both numerous trips up and down high towers with lots of stairs in them and swimming.

The closest he had come to trying the latter since his return from the Gurkish prison had been enjoying his morning bath. He had never even thought of doing anything more – it was hard enough for him to get from one place to another on dry land, where he wasn't in any danger of drowning if his body cramped; he had no reason to try, and no hope to enjoy the exercise, so why would he have?

"I'm not going to get any better than I was," he repeated. "They were surprised I even managed that much."

"You were also eating soup every day and going to bed never knowing if you'd wake up with a mess all over you." The assassin's voice held a fine edge that cut precisely where Glokta suspected he had intended to hit.

Anger rose in him even though he couldn't say precisely at what.

"You know nothing, Mikal," he lashed out, his voice rising. He forced himself to walk on, even though his hands were trembling and the pain flashing up and down his back and leg growing more acute as muscles tensed. "You have no idea what it's like to lose everything you have, to be broken almost beyond recognition in the course of your duty! You don't know what I've gone through, what I've done and what it's cost me to come to grips with what they left of me! I do not need your _advice_!"

Even in his agitated state, Glokta did not miss that something about Mikal's posture had changed. Like his own, the assassin's body had tensed, ready to spring into action if threatened – as if he, Glokta, the cripple, could have threatened him! He didn’t even have his cane with the hidden sword in it to help him, and if he had tried, the slightest bit of resistance would have swept him off of his feet.

"One day, bandits burned down my home, slaughtered my wife and son and left me for dead – but they did none of that before they had had their way with her, one after the other, while I was tied up and held at the point of a dagger, forced to look on and do nothing. I cannot tell you how many times I wished the blade they stabbed me with had been placed a little better and actually pierced my heart as it was supposed to. You think I know nothing about losing everything I had?" Mikal gave a mirthless laugh. "I'm a dead man, Sand dan Glokta, pretending to be alive. Just as we all are." There was a dangerous coldness to his voice now, an almost inhuman quality that sent a shiver down Glokta's spine to accompany the pain already there.

"For all that counts I died that night on that hill, even though my heart kept on beating.

"The man I was no longer exists. I know nothing about starting over after losing my life? It's all we are! Ask Lissa what happened to her, growing up in a brothel. Ask Sorin how he lost that eye. Ask Rinn —on second thought, don't ask Rinn if you want to stay alive." He laughed again, the sound even more unpleasant this time, with a tone that made Glokta doubt the man's sanity for a moment.

 _Just as anyone would doubt the sanity of a man becoming a torturer after just having survived two years of torture himself_.

"Why did you turn to the inquisition after returning?" Mikal asked, as if he had read Glokta's mind.

_Yes. Why did I? Why would anyone? Anyone at all, let alone someone who had been through it himself?_

As always, Glokta failed to come up with an adequate explanation.

"No answer?" Mikal's lips twitched into a parody of a smile. "I think you did it because you could. We're beyond the conventions of right or wrong, Sand, even if you like to pretend otherwise. Going beyond the social conventions of what's acceptable to do to a person means nothing to us anymore. We kill, you tortured – there's no space for a conscience in the place we went to to survive what happened to us. We can do it without breaking under it because we're already broken."

_A dead man, just as we all are._

"We take those Targets that are the hardest to get to, the most dangerous to dispose of. They," he gestured towards the trainees that were now slowly filing out of the fencing court, losing interest in the drill while two lone figures remained exchanging blows. Those were two of the older assassins who had joined his lessons. "They will be given the safe Targets, those easy to handle, without much danger to the one who delivers the blow. We take on the others, and if we don't return from a mission, then so be it, as long as we take the Target with us – you can't be afraid of death if you're already dead. You can only make it as hard as possible for them to make you admit that you are."

Glokta couldn't help but think of the many times he had ruthlessly endangered his life in the course of his duties as an inquisitor and, later, Superior, the times he had risked his own death to reach his goals.

But surely, surely it was different. He had taken care of Ardee. He had shown mercy in the most unlikely situations, surprising even himself. He hadn't had to do any of that.

 _And they took an injured man into their sanctum and nursed him back to health_ , an unbidden thought intruded. _They gave you back the ability to enjoy food. They didn't have to do any of that either._

Still, he couldn't agree with Mikal's reasoning just yet. Even though he didn't know what he might provoke if he spoke up, even though he half suspected that he might be proving one of the man's points by speaking up anyway, he objected. "None of you is living in a shattered body, unable to return to his former life even if they wanted to! You don't know what it means to have that road closed to you, to have to find ways to do even the simplest of things again, still failing at some and needing to rely on workarounds and props for others—" he slapped at his crutch with his free hand, just a moment before he felt himself shoved sideways.

He ended up with his back against the side of the cottage they had just been passing, one of Mikal's large hands on either side of him, effectively pinning him there.

"You think I never had those moments when I came out of that assignment with a useless right hand? I'm sure no one would have blamed me if I'd decided to just settle down then, retire from active duty and become a trainer instead, maybe take up some trade that was needed around the Keep.

"But I wouldn't have survived half a year without a purpose – without the hunt for a Target."

Glokta hardly felt the pain in his abused body now over the hammering of his heart and the rush of adrenalin brought on by the sudden attack. He should back down now, say something to take the tension out of the situation, to let the other man calm down.

He was, after all, at the assassin's mercy.

His eyes darted back and forth across the area he could see from his position, but found no one who could have come to his aid – if they even would have.

"There's nothing wrong with your hand. I saw you throw a knife with it and hit a fucking fence-post," he snarled, which was probably the stupidest thing he could have done. Still, he couldn't help himself. The words wanted out, and there was too much anger at Mikal's earlier statements already, waiting for an outlet.

He met the assassin's eyes calmly, ready to take whatever would come now. It couldn't be worse than what he had already survived. If this was how he’d end, then at least he'd be facing his death instead of having it come as a silent dagger in the back.

_A battered body found at the foot of a mountain pass…_

Mikal raised his right arm, but the stroke Glokta anticipated never came.

Instead, the hand with its fingerless glove was shoved into his face, fingers curling into a loose fist and opening again.

"Nothing wrong?" he asked, bringing up his other hand to pull at the laces that held the leather closed along the outside of his hand and wrist, pushing back his shirt to reveal a leather sleeve that ran halfway down his forearm, complete with a sheath that had one of his throwing knives nestled in it.

The laces sufficiently loosened, he worked his hand free of the leather and pulled it off before holding up his hand again.

An indentation marred the back of his hand at the centre, a red-tinged splotch on the untanned white skin that marked the edges of his glove precisely. A thick cord of twisted scar tissue ran up from it to end between his first and middle finger.

He turned the hand over, revealing matching scars on the palm.

"Nothing wrong indeed." He snatched the knife from its sheath in the leather sleeve he still held in his other hand.

Glokta, watching in fascination, saw the tremor start in the assassin's hand, the blade in it shaking violently with it.

"You think I could hit a fence-post with this?" Mikal asked. "I couldn't even use that hand to cut my food before we found a way to keep it steady."

Glokta only half-listened anymore. His eyes were fixed on the scars that were moving back and forth, standing out even more starkly now that the hand was clenched tightly in order not to drop the knife.

_The prisoner jerked – whether it was more out of pain or out of fury was hard to tell – and the sound of tearing flesh would have made the inquisitor's stomach revolt, had there been anything in it. Sand dan Glokta, former Colonel of the army and recently a member of the inquisition, shifted in his seat as the hand was brought up, blood streaming from it._

_The practical jumped forward, throwing his weight onto the prisoner's arm and wrenching it back down._

_"Another nail?" he asked calmly, as if he wasn't leaning most of his weight onto an arm that still moved slightly back and forth as the prisoner, clenching his lips shut to hold back a groan of pain, struggled against his hold._

_For a moment, Glokta forgot the searing pain in his leg and the spasms that intermittently shot through his back, both surely a match for what his prisoner was going through right now. This was an interesting lesson that he would have to remember for the future._

_He had thought driving a nail through the prisoner's hand would be more effective in keeping it flat on the table and thus at hand for further treatment. He thought of the round scars on his own arms, half a hand's width above the wrist, precisely between the bones of his forearm._

_So there had been a good reason for putting them there, even if it had left him able to clench his hands into fists and keep his fingers away from the torturer's instruments for a little while longer, until his practical – or the Gurkish counterpart of one – had forced his hand open and down._

_He had come out of that day's session with a number of carefully broken fingers._

_Glokta flexed his hand with remembered pain. At least those fractures had healed well enough, leaving his hands still dextrous enough for some torturing of his own._

Why am I doing this? _He asked himself silently._ Why would anyone want to do this, let alone someone who has been a victim of torture himself?

_He fell short of an answer, as usual._

_Instead of pondering the matter any further, he shook his head. "No. Shackle him. We'll try something else."_

_It wasn't like he didn't have enough experience with methods that he knew to work from first-hand experience to draw from. He could always exhaust those before trying something new again._

The realisation must have registered clearly on his face.

Mikal's lips drew back in a cold smile. "I see you recognise your work, if not my face."

Glokta felt chilled to the bone, rising panic warring with the agony of suddenly tensing muscles. He stood facing a man he had once tortured, and he was entirely at his mercy now.

_A body found at the bottom of a gorge, mangled beyond recognition…_

He knew what he would have done to the Gurkish torturer if he had been able to get his hands on him.

Of course, he had never inflicted as much torture on any one victim as the Gurkish had inflicted on him. He had never once had someone in his hands for that long. Even his personal toy, held for his own entertainment only, had not lived nearly as long as he had survived in the enemy's dungeons.

No. Surely if the man had intended to get back at him for what he had done, he would have done so already. But what if—

Another memory wormed its way into his mind.

_Why send you of all people?_

They had known. They had all known.

Well, maybe not _all_ , but enough of them in any case.

"You looked different then." What a stupid thing to say – he probably should have apologised, grovelled, asked the assassin's forgiveness to save his life and what health he still had, but he could not - would not - do that.

If Mikal decided that it was time to pay him back after all, then so be it. It wasn't like he expected that he would ever leave the assassins' stronghold alive anyway.

He thought of the prisoner he had tortured at the time. He'd been bald, his scalp tattooed in memorable patterns. His clothes, while he had still had them, had been gaudy, with colourful patches sewn on.

Come to think of it, there had been a lot about that man to catch a person's attention and to remain etched in memory – but nothing of it had pertained to his facial features.

Glokta squinted and stared at the assassin's hairline, trying to guess whether the tattoos were actually there or had been part of a disguise.

"I guess I did." Mikal's face relaxed minutely as he slammed the knife back into its sheath with his left hand, and then his right arm into the leather glove – brace, Glokta corrected his thoughts. It's a brace, not a glove.

Mikal took a step back, giving Glokta space.

The direct threat of the assassin just inches from his face gone, the former inquisitor felt his left knee buckle, and he managed to slide down the wall at his back just slowly enough to not call it a fall.

Sitting on the ground, an even easier target for the assassin's wrath now if that was even possible, he carefully stretched out his bad leg in front of him and closed his eyes, waiting for what was to come next.

He heard the rustle of cloth as the other man moved and fought to stop himself from tensing in anticipation of another blow that never came.

His eyes opened again, almost of their own accord, to find Mikal sitting cross-legged just to his side, expertly re-tying the laces of the leather sleeve one-handedly before shaking his shirtsleeve back over it.

"Aren't you going to do anything?" Glokta asked before he could stop himself.

"Like what?" Mikal asked. "Kill you? Torture you? Ruin your hand? Why would I?"

Glokta stared.

This time, the assassin's laugh actually held some amusement. "You were doing your job and I was doing mine. I went in there knowing what I was in for. Well," he amended, "not in that much detail, but it doesn't take a genius to know that if you send yourself into a prison of the inquisition you're going to experience some of the inquisition's loving attentions."

"Send yourself…?" Glokta asked. Who would want to do that?

At the same time, a suspicion started to dawn on him. There had been an incident at that time… one that he had feared might break his proverbial neck in the inquisition before he had even started truly carving a place for himself there.

"You were doing your job and I was doing mine," Mikal repeated. "You may remember that I even admitted to killing Rand Blackburn in your dungeons."

He did remember that.

"You admitted to doing a great many things," Glokta returned. "Most of them outrageously unlikely or impossible. I've rarely heard a prisoner babble so much."

"If you get caught and subjected to questioning by the inquisition," Mikal told him, his words sounding rehearsed, like something he had either heard or said – or both – quite often, "there is no point in trying to remain silent. No matter how good you are, they will be better. You will talk eventually. You will tell them all they want to know, and more. Talk early. Tell them so many lies and variations that they will not have any way of figuring out which ones are true and which ones are not in the end. Never think you could stop yourself from telling the truth in the end – you can only keep them from knowing that they've heard the truth now."

Glokta shuddered involuntarily. It was true. He had experienced it himself after all. He had tried to hold out for a long time, but eventually he had caved and blurted out all that he was questioned about. Then he had kept on babbling, telling them things they hadn't asked, everything he could think of, anything to stop the pain.

Only they hadn't been looking for any real information at that point – at least he didn't think so. At some point they must have switched to torturing him merely for the fun of reducing proud Colonel Glokta to a whimpering, begging heap of pain and misery.

How many of the things he had told them had they used, though? Could he have prevented it if he had engaged in the assassins' method of facing torture?

How often _did_ they get caught to have a policy for how to act if subjected to questioning?

He stopped himself from asking that question, instead settling on a different one that was burning on his mind. "How did you do it? We never considered it a possibility – you couldn't have gotten out of your cell."

"There are ways to hide things on a human body," Mikal pointed out. "Things such as lock picks or small amounts of potent poison. Not my usual method of choice, but sometimes you have to go with what works in your setting. The job was to silence the man before he spilled the information I was sent to protect. "

"That means you returned to your cell. Why didn’t you let yourself out?" It may not have been the wisest thing to continue this conversation, but Glokta was getting curious now. Who would return to face certain torture if they had a way out?

One corner of the assassin's mouth twitched up. "For one thing, it's a lot harder to get out of the prison and far enough away to be safe than it is to get out of one cell and into another. For another, I still needed to try and find out if he had already talked before that. I do my job."

_Because I'm known for getting the job done, no matter what._

Yes, indeed.

Glokta frowned as he tried to remember what had become of the prisoner once he had been through with him. There hadn't been much in his confessions that was of any use. Too much of it was too outrageously unbelievable even for the inquisition. That had been before he had had his practical draw up prepared confessions that only needed to be signed. At the time, he had still thought he could extract a confession first and work only with what the prisoner told him.

He thought the man had been transferred to a labour camp, but he hadn't paid that much attention. Once the questioning was over, the prisoners were none of his business anymore.

Still… "How'd you get out then?"

"We don't leave our own to rot in a camp," Mikal offered easily. "Just as I knew I'd be interrogated, the others knew I'd need a hand getting out of there, so they provided that. Took me a while to get back into shape enough to take on my next hit, though."

Glokta's eyes dropped to the other man's hand, steady again now.

"Amazing what a little support can do, isn't it?" Mikal flicked the knife from his arm sheath into his hand and tossed it into the air, catching it again easily.

The former inquisitor's gaze was locked on the gleaming blade.

_A body found riddled with holes from a knife…_

Mikal shoved the blade back into his sleeve as he climbed to his feet, holding out his now-free hand for Glokta to take once he stood. "Come on, Sand dan Glokta. I believe you weren't quite done with your walk yet."

Staring at the offered hand in disbelief, Glokta started sorting out his legs and his crutch. Getting up from the ground wasn't an easy thing, and a helpful hand could be more hindrance than help except in the best of circumstances. "Aren't you going to…?" he started cautiously.

"What?" The assassin laughed. "Stab you for questioning me once? You were doing your job. If I did that then I'd have to go and hang myself for having done mine many times over. Now get up before you catch cold down there." His expression turned into a smirk. "Speaking of cold, though – I'd reconsider that pond if I was you. Elsewise I might just grab you and toss you in one of these days."


	11. Chapter 11

The sun had barely risen over the horizon, and Glokta couldn't believe that he was already up and about. The village was silent, the air still pleasantly cool. He stared out over the expanse of calm water before him, coloured red by the reflected dawn.

Mikal wouldn’t really throw him in if he didn't try it on his own, would he?

Unfortunately, he wasn't so sure of that.

Squinting, he tried to gauge the distance to the other side of the pond. He could walk that far, and back again, without _too_ much trouble. At least he could have before the coach crash.

How much more painful than on land could it be to move in water?

His neck sent a warning spasm as he cocked his head in contemplation.

On land, you didn't drown if you were temporarily incapacitated by cramping muscles.

How deep was that pond anyway?

He turned away, pivoting on his good foot and digging his crutch into the ground just in time to keep from stumbling.

Why was he even still surprised at the sudden appearance of his 'shadow'?

"Up so early?" At least he thought he managed to sound sufficiently unfazed.

Mikal stood just a few steps at his back, arms crossed in front of his chest, and very effectively blocking the way back to the village. He hadn't bothered to tie the laces in his sleeves, but the rest of his attire was impeccable, suggesting that it was a deliberate oversight rather than the result of dressing in a hurry.

"Heard you were out already," the assassin told him without budging from where he stood.

Heard it from whom? Glokta wondered. He hadn't seen anyone on his way, and he had been looking. If this went on much longer, he'd start having some real trouble sleeping at night.

 _Though really, you should be used to being unable to shut out visitors_ , he told himself. _It's not like that ghost asked your permission to show up in your bedchamber either._

"Nothing like some morning exercise to start the day," Glokta remarked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I think I've had enough of it now, though."

The other man's eyebrows moved towards his hairline. "Have you? You seem quite dry still."

"I walked all the way out here," Glokta pointed out. "That's quite enough for one morning. I haven't even had breakfast yet." The thought made his mouth water in anticipation. Being able to actually eat still hadn't lost any of its wonder.

"Neither have I." Mikal contemplated the body of water before them. "Try it. You know you want to."

He certainly did not. He had no wish at all to subject himself to something that was likely going to be painful and potentially fatal.

His escape route was effectively cut off though, and torn between having to beg the man to let him pass and risking the pond, the second option was starting to appear more attractive.

"I'll drown," he stated flatly, hoping that that was all it would take to make Mikal understand the impossibility of his idea. "My body cramps up without warning. I'll drown before I can get back enough control to come up again."

"Okay," the other man answered after a moment's consideration. Glokta had almost taken a breath of relief when he went on. "I'll jump in and pull you out if it happens."

He glared up at the assassin. "And I'll believe you'll do that because…?"

Mikal's shrug looked like he really couldn't care any less. "Because you're still alive? Because I didn't break your neck when I had you at my mercy while we were bringing you back here? Because my First would be extremely unhappy with me if I let you drown? Because for the moment, keeping you alive is my job, and I don't mess up my jobs?" A moment's silence, followed by: "Pick one, or two, or as many as you like, and then get started. It'll be easier if you're not wearing quite as much. I find that boots, especially, are something of a burden in the water."

As if to prove his words, Mikal stepped out of his own, without bending down and by putting the toe of one foot against the heel of the other to keep down the boot while he extracted his foot from it. "There. Just in case I do have to jump in to help you."

With a glowering look, Glokta gingerly lowered himself onto a large rock. Much as he would have liked to at least mirror Mikal's method of taking off of his boots, he knew he stood no chance. Missing toes got in the way of that, as well as his inability to balance on his left leg, and a general uncooperativeness of the same.

His back gave a warning twinge as he bent forward to wrestle off his right boot, then tease the left off while trying not to cause his bad leg any reason for further complaints. By all rights, there should be laws against forcing a man to get out of his clothes less than an hour after getting into them painfully.

The rest of his clothes, at least, were loose and easy to slip out of without requiring any distortion, the shirt wide-sleeved and cut straight, held together around his waist with a belt that should have carried at least a dagger. Everyone else had daggers in theirs, and many, even among the trainees, wore other weapons as well. Glokta knew because he had been paying attention. He was the only man in the village who went about unarmed – unless you counted his crutch as a weapon.

He hesitated, his hands already grasping the fabric. He usually had no qualms to tell his would-be victims all about the scars the Gurkish torturers had left all over his body at all. Yet now the hesitated to expose his scarred body to a man he knew bore many of the same scars.

A sound behind him suggested that Mikal was taking a step or two towards him. Suddenly quite afraid that the man might make good on his threat and throw him in the lake fully dressed, Glokta banished his thoughts into a remote corner of his mind and stripped to his underwear.

It's no different from when you were training for the Contest, he told himself. You spent hours doing your laps then.

But no amount of repetition would make him believe that. Back then, he had been a dashing young up-and-coming military officer, and he had certainly drawn many looks, both admiring ones from the ladies and jealous ones from young men who knew they would never be able to match him.

He'd draw looks now as well, he thought as he limped the remaining steps to the water's edge, but of an entirely different kind.

Once he would have jumped in without a second thought, or run in at a slightly more shallow part until the water grew deep enough to swim. Now he had to lower himself to the ground painfully first, then get into the pond slowly, giving himself plenty of time to appreciate how cold the water was.

That, at least, was still the same, and he knew it would become less unpleasant once he actually started to move.

Even though he had half expected that he would sink like a stone, unable to keep himself afloat, he noticed with surprise that his body remembered what to do when surrounded by water. Moving carefully, he tried a few strokes that took him a little way closer the middle – not nearly as much as they would once have, but at least he was getting somewhere.

His back and shoulders complained about the unusual exercise, but at least they didn't seem inclined to spasm. His leg, without the weight of his body on it, felt surprisingly good.

So did he, until he had passed the centre of the pond and felt fatigue creeping up on him.

 _Really?_ He thought at his body as he tried to gauge the distance he had covered. _Really, really? You can't be_ that _much out of shape even all things considered._

But he could be, it appeared, and he felt each stroke drag on him by the time he reached the shallows on the other side.

For a moment, he thought about waving for Mikal to come over and bring his crutch and his clothes. He had almost raised his hand to do just that when he reconsidered. He hadn't given up through two years of Gurkish torture – he wouldn’t be bested by a tiny little lake.

His arms felt heavier than they should, and it wasn't getting any better as he worked his way through the pond again. Pond! It felt like a sea right now, even though he knew that objectively speaking, it didn't even qualify as a lake.

Mikal stood where he had left him, watching with an expressionless face.

"Happy now?" Glokta ground out when he had reached him. Even knowing it couldn't possibly be the case while mostly submersed in water, he felt drenched with sweat.

Trying to get his feet under him, he discovered that his leg was quite happy not to have to bear his weight, and refused to hold up under him.

A strong hand caught his arm before he could fall into the wet sand face-first.

"Enough for today," he declared, though somewhat needlessly.

Without objection, Mikal helped him back to his clothes.

"That didn't go so badly," the assassin commented as Glokta tried to thread his foot through the leg of his trousers.

He grunted, unwilling to comment on the statement either way.

"You can do that again tomorrow morning."

Glokta tried for a convincing glare. "We'll see."

Further denial was held back by the knowledge that most likely, he would.

He laced up his shoes somewhat more forcefully than necessary, uncertain if he was angry at Mikal for the knowing smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth, or at himself.

At least the man could have brought a towel, since he seemed to have planned to only let Glokta return to the valley after a sidetrip through the pond anyway.

Now he needed to go back to his room and change, which meant getting out of these clothes yet again and then into fresh ones. Dressing had been so much easier once.

He pushed himself to his feet with his crutch and, moving carefully as he ascertained that his leg had finally caught up with him and realised it was on dry land and expected to do some work, made his way back to the path.

Mikal was standing aside now, ready to take up his position as Glokta's silent shadow.

Suppressing a sigh, Glokta focused on the uneven ground between him and the somewhat better path ahead, grinding his teeth against the pain as he dragged his left foot over rocks and clumps of grass.

Shifting his weight to the left, he lifted his right foot and yelped involuntarily as his ankle and knee buckled, searing pain shooting up his side and driving tears to both eyes.

Either Mikal knew that grabbing his arm to hold him up in that situation would only aggravate the situation, possibly leaving him with a dislocated joint, or he didn't consider helping him stay on his feet any part of his duties right now, in spite of the previous day's offer to serve as a living banister.

He knelt on the ground, squeezing shut his eyes and mouth as he waited for the pain to subside, realising only after several moments that it wouldn't while his leg was bent double under him, and letting himself drop sideways to get his foot out from beneath him and stretch out the limb.

"Have you ever considered wearing a brace on that leg?"

Glokta's head shot up at the sound of a new voice, a motion he regretted instantly as his neck spasmed, white-hot pain drowning out the slowly subsiding complaints of his leg for the moment.

Blinking away tears, he looked around until he spotted a woman standing not three strides away from him. How long had she been there? If she knew the same trick that Mikal had down to an art, standing motionless until he blended with the background, she might even have watched his feeble efforts at exercise. She was of average height, her grey hair falling openly past her shoulders, its colour and her facial features suggesting that she had at least two, maybe three, decades on both Glokta and Mikal.

"In fact I have." His voice sounded strained with suppressed pain. "Had to move the leg in one line – that didn't work out very well. I walk much better without."

"Hm." She leaned her chin on one hand, supporting the elbow of that arm on the palm of the other. "So… What if it let you bend the knee to step forward, and only locked once you put your weight down on it?" Going by her tone, they could have sat at a table having lunch and discussing the latest, but not very exciting, news. Did she even realise the man before her was sitting in the dirt still dripping wet from the pond and trying to dredge up the courage to climb back to his feet?

"I didn't know there was such a thing," he rasped as he rode out another wave of pain that he felt was entirely unjustified. He hadn't done anything!

A smile twitched at her lips, but it stopped short of reaching her eyes.

Mikal smiled that way, Glokta realised.

 _Do I smile like that?_ Possibly.

Probably.

How long had it been since he had really felt happy enough to justify a genuine smile rather than a social one because it was expected?

Since before the Gurkish prison, that was for sure.

_Because we're already dead…_

Half-lost in his thoughts, he almost missed the answer.

"There isn't, to my knowledge." After a pause too short for him to interject that then the question was inessential anyway, she added: "That doesn’t mean we can't make one."

"Make one?" he heard himself repeat.

 _Idiot_ , he mentally snarled at himself. _You're sounding like a complete fool._

If she noticed, she didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, she turned to her colleague. "Bring him round after lunch, Mikal, and we'll see what we can do with that."

Without waiting for any confirmation or objection from Glokta, she turned and walked away, grey hair tousled by the strengthening wind.

That same wind was making him feel cold now, and he finally struggled back upright, clinging to his crutch like a lifeline.

Mikal, while not offering an arm, stood close enough so Glokta could have reached for him, had he wanted to.

He did not, mutely starting up the path, his eyes fixed straight ahead and looked out for anything in his path that might trip him again.

"Mari makes the most astonishing cripples, you know," Mikal's voice was conversational, contrasting sharply with the contents of his words.

"Is that supposed to put me at ease?" Glokta asked. "In case it's slipped your mind, I already am a cripple."

For some reason, that amused the other man, a chuckle evident in his voice. "I guess a lot of people think our work is pretty straightforward. Get in, kill, get out. It's not, I can assure you. Sometimes, we also get hired simply for the sake of acquiring information or an object. Even many Targets require prior reconnaissance. Often lots of it. You have to know your Targets well. You have to be able to predict when they're going to be where, what they're likely to do, how they will react. Now, how do you put yourself in a position that's good for observing but where you won't be noticed, or remembered?"

Glokta shrugged, waiting for a new stab of pain to come of it, and glad that it didn't. "Set up shop nearby?" he suggested.

"Ah, but people would remember that," Mikal pointed out. "And you'd have no guarantee that your Target would actually come near. You'd be tied to one spot, unable to follow. Tell me, how many beggars does Adua have? How many cripples, how many old ones, making a living begging in the streets?"

That, Glokta had to admit, he didn't know. "A handful?" he suggested, just before he realised that that couldn't be right. The war must have left its mark on more people than just him, and they couldn't have all been as lucky to find a new career, and the common soldiers didn't necessarily have a family that would be able to take care of them either. Collem West had been poor among the officers, but from the point of view of many a common solider, he must have seemed rich.

"Probably a few more than that," he allowed.

"Probably," Mikal confirmed. "But you don't know. You can't remember. You don't know if you saw them every day on your way through the city, or only on rare occasions, if you even saw them at all. You know you must have, but you can't actually recall their looks.

"Beggars, you see, are invisible in their own way. Especially the old, the ugly and the crippled. Better-off people give them a wide berth, and even if they throw them a coin or two, they'll avoid to actually look."

Much as he would have liked to deny that, Glokta couldn't. He had just rendered proof of its truth.

Mikal didn't seem to want any response from him. He merely paused to take a breath, then went on: "But do you know, the city guards are not very happy if they catch someone pretending. For that matter, neither are the real cripples. They don't like someone possibly taking some of their income away from them, and who could blame them?

"But imagine yourself, what? Ten years ago? Imagine you would have been asked to pretend to be as you are now. Could you have? Day and night, day after day, for however long it takes? Knowing you could be watched everywhere, anywhere?"

He couldn't have, and he knew it. There were so many little things made difficult or impossible by his condition, things that you never even thought about, things that he would have automatically done right – or, in this case – wrong, without ever thinking of them.

Glokta shook his head ever so slightly, though he said nothing.

"So if you need to do that, you go to Mari, and you'll work out what things you'll need to stay able to do easily, and she'll make you some accessories to wear that'll _force_ you to be convincing. At least while you manage to keep your clothes on over them."

Even without looking at him, Glokta knew that the other man was sporting that smile once more.

"You think she can do it the other way around as well?" His voice clearly reflected that he did not share that belief.

"Most things can be turned into their opposite," Mikal pointed out, unmoved by Glokta's disagreement. "Quantity and method of administration often are the only thing that makes the difference between poison and medicine."

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

"Not quite," Glokta said in response to what must have been the twentieth repetition of the manoeuver at hand. He gave an inward sigh. Up to now, he had limited himself to explaining, describing, correcting. Now he was increasingly feeling an urge to get up and step into the fencing court, to take the steels from one of them and show what he meant – or as much as he could, given his limitations.

Should he dare? He wasn't quite sure. Would they let him handle a weapon, even a blunt practice one as it was?

He hadn't even tried asking for a dagger yet, though he would have felt easier if he had had something with which to defend himself, if anything he was capable of doing could be called defence. Most probably it was merely the remainder of his soldier's mind still feeling uncomfortable without a blade on him.

He had no reason to expect that they would comply with any such request, and every reason to expect the opposite, so he had kept his peace.

It would have been tempting his luck a bit too much.

Still, his explanations did not seem to bear any fruit now, and while he would have been unable to give a demonstration of the footwork that went with the attack and defence, at least he could demonstrate how to shift the grip on the hilt properly when shifting from defence to attack.

Reaching for his cane, he pushed himself to his feet and tested his bad leg.

It held under his weight – of course it did. It had to. Cold, unrelenting steel snapped against the front of his lower leg, pushing back his knee and keeping it from buckling.

Mikal might be able to do with _a little support_ on his hand, but Glokta’s leg had needed a lot more than that. For a moment, as he had stood in front of her after the long, tedious and painful process of getting out of most of his clothes again – really, it had been a long time since he had dressed and undressed that often in a single day – Mari had seemed ready to admit defeat.

A moment later, her face had set in a decisive expression and she had set to work, firing a rapid string of questions of what he could or couldn't do at him – there was far more of the second than the first – and what his leg would or wouldn't take – in which case the first category was virtually non-existent.

"Stand up straight," she'd told him and he had glowered at her, his hands clenched on the edge of a table to keep standing at all.

"This is as straight as I get," he'd snarled, his patience already worn thin by Mikal's earlier insistence on the swim, no matter that it hadn't turned out nearly as badly as he had expected. Nevertheless, he had tried to stretch a bit more, hoping to get his body to look a little less twisted.

She wasn't even looking anywhere near his torso, though.

"If that's straight, your left leg is shorter than your right," she said with a frown. "Your hips are like this." Her hands drew a diagonal line in the air that had to be vastly exaggerated.

"Wouldn't be surprised," Glokta muttered. Considering all the abuse his left leg had taken, the injuries, the fractures, the opposite would probably have been more surprising.

He got a grunt from her for the comment, as she gestured to Mikal.

The other assassin apparently knew what was expected of him, as he wordlessly scooped up a choice of thin boards from a basket and knelt by Glokta's side, putting down one after the other and letting him step on them until Mari was satisfied.

By then, Glokta was feeling like he was standing quite skewed, though she insisted he was level now.

He was ready to sit down, really, to take the weight off of his leg and to give his back what relief it could get.

It took another while, though, before he was given the chance, as Mari measured, sketched and pelted him with a veritable avalanche of questions.

"What do you even need to know all that for?" he asked at one point, hobbling over to a chair without permission, just about ready to call off the entire project if he had to remain standing for as much as another minute.

He winced as his left foot hit the ground harder than intended. He hadn't realised just how much distance there had been between it and the floor.

"I don't know," the woman replied off-handedly, without looking up from where she was scribbling down notes. She went on before he could protest the pointless asking: "I just want to make sure I have as much information as possible to anticipate problems before they happen. I've never tried to do things this way around before, you know."

He knew – he was quite painfully aware of it, in fact. The reminder left him once again wondering why he was even doing this, why he was letting them try something so utterly pointless.

The answer was not to his liking.

How could he still, after all this time, nurture even the slightest hope that things might improve for him?

 _But you are eating proper meals again_ , an unbidden voice insinuated itself into his head just as he was about to get up and declare the entire thing over. _You're going to sleep without worrying about the mess in which you'll wake up._

It had taken a few days and several return visits before they had arrived at a definite result. By then, Glokta had swapped his crutch for a simple cane again, mostly because it made him feel slightly less dependent on support and a tiny bit less crippled, even though the crutch had definitely had its advantages. He had tripped and fallen less often with the better support that it offered, for one thing.

He had to admit, though, that now that he wore the steel brace on his leg, at least his risk of falling seemed to have reduced again. As Mari had promised, it didn't restrict his ability to bend his knee when he moved his leg forward – an ability that he was now making increasing use of. Before, every step had entailed the risk of his knee folding under him when he put his weight on it, his abused thigh muscles unable to hold the joint stable again. As a result, he had ended up sliding his foot along the ground, bending the knee as little as possible, to avoid that risk as well as the pain that accompanied the contraction of those muscles.

The brace holding his knee in position after a step provided just enough relief to keep his thigh from cramping or giving up on any attempt of working entirely, rendering the process of walking somewhat safer and, he thought, possibly a little less painful.

Mari's work hadn't stopped at that, though. She had complemented the brace with footwear that looked like a regular, though somewhat fancy, pair of boots at first glance.

He wouldn't have been able to lend them to anyone, though. Where the right one was just a boot, nothing but polished black leather with a set of decorative buckles up the outer side, the left was moulded to his mutilations.

Before, no matter how tightly he laced his shoes, his toeless foot would never quite find the support that it should have had. There was too much space in any shoe, leaving ample opportunity to rub the always-tender scar tissue on what was left of his foot raw.

This new boot was tailored to his foot, fitting its shape precisely, hugging the outlines of what remained of Glokta with padded lining. The toe of his boot was stuffed to give the impression of a complete foot even if someone stepped on it.

The ankle was reinforced, rendering it not exactly stiff but keeping his foot from dropping and scraping over the floor without his intention.

Last, the boot had also been given a thicker sole, initially leaving Glokta feeling like he was perpetually walking with one foot on a board. More than anything else, that had forced him to actually lift his foot clear of the ground and swing it through under his body rather than resorting to his default gait of click-tap-slide along the ground.

The pain in his hip had lessened considerably, though, and even his back was complaining a little less.

His students moved apart as he approached, making room, for him in the practice yard.

Without thinking about it, Glokta reached out and adjusted one man's grip on his steel before holding out his hand for someone else's weapon. "If you don't mind?" The polite words were very clearly a command, and the blade was passed to him properly, hilt-first.

Glokta's hand closed around it almost on its own accord. It felt wonderfully right to hold a weapon again, not the carefully custom-made steel hidden in the cane he had lost, but the real thing.

Balancing carefully on his good leg and cane, Glokta executed two cuts with the steel, his movements slow and deliberate. "See?" he asked. "Like this." He pointed at one of the students with the tip of his blade. "Come at me. Nothing fancy though. Stick with the drill. I'm not standing stably enough to actually play with you."

Admitting to it so openly might not have been the wisest idea – then again, it was hardly possible to hide the fact.

Obediently, the young man attacked, executing the movement as accurately as Glokta could have hoped.

He was surprised at how well his body still reacted. Years of daily drill had left their mark on him so deeply that even years of torture could not erase it.

His arms were the least affected part of his body, still able to handle the steel – if he could have fenced with his arms only, he would still have been adequate, he thought. He had certainly been able to dispatch his former practical well enough as well.

The steel in his hand snapped up, meeting the blade coming towards him just where it gave him the most leverage to push away his attacker's weapon.

A painful jolt ran up Glokta's arm, digging into his shoulder and amplifying as it reached his spine. Stabbing practical Frost had been that much easier. There had been no impact of steel on steel, no sudden interruption of his movement.

Forcing himself to hold his position, he let his eyes dart from one student to the next. They were all watching attentively, or pretending to in any case.

"See what I mean?"

Heads bobbed, and Glokta gave a single nod to his opponent, indicating for him to back off.

He lowered his steel as the other man moved back and took down his own.

"Good," he said as he returned the sword to its owner. "Get to practicing."

As he made his slow, painful way back to his seat, he felt anger rise in him – directed at no one in particular but himself. The reluctance he had felt to relinquish the steel, even though it was nothing but a blunt, heavy practice weapon, made it that much harder for him to lie to himself about having accepted his fate.

Mikal, he noticed, was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the woman Vilya was leaning against the fence, evidence that they still weren't letting him go anywhere without supervision.

Lowering himself down into the chair, Glokta breathed a sigh of relief. His leg was less painful than it had been, but it was still quite impressively displeased with being walked on for any period of time.

He felt the tension build up in his neck, and out of reflex and habit, turned his head to relieve it.

A painful spasm followed the 'click' almost immediately.

 _Stupid_ , Glokta berated himself mentally as his eyes watered and he tried to ride out the pain. _When will you finally learn not to do that?_

His students had gone back to their drill as ordered, and no one was paying any attention to him.

No one, that was, but his unasked-for bodyguard.

She came over, stopping close to his chair and leaning down a little. Her voice was hardly above a whisper when she spoke. "Are you alright?"

Grimacing, Glokta nodded cautiously, still waiting for the pain in his neck to subside to its usual background level completely. "Just the usual," he told her. "You know, long-term effects of long-term torture. They always make sure you remember them."

Eyebrows raised slightly, she stepped behind him. "May I?"

He had no idea what she was asking permission for. If she was anything like Mikal, however – and she probably was – saying no wouldn't make a difference. Mikal always managed to get his way. He had with the pond and he had with his visit to Mari's workshop.

Admittedly, though, both had turned out to be good ideas. Swimming worked much better than he had ever dared hope, and he found that he was almost enjoying a bit of exercise that could be done without excruciating pain.

Mari's work had made his walking less precarious and even relieved some of the pain that came with it.

Really, he should take what he was offered.

His mind objected to his thoughts the moment he felt the woman's hands on his neck. He didn't need an assassin's fingers there!

_A broken body found by the side of a mountain path, its neck broken, the head twisted almost completely around…_

Hadn't Mikal said something to that effect about Pike?

Of course he had also said that it must have happened in the coach crash. Had he told it only to him, Glokta might have been inclined to believe in a lie, but he remembered that the report to the First of the guild, given just after their arrival, had corroborated that version of events.

Mikal hadn't known that Glokta was awake enough to listen at the time, had he? He couldn't have.

"I'm not going to break your neck," he heard Vilya's voice behind him. She still spoke barely above a whisper.

His head jerked around, causing another jolt of pain that raced down his spine.

How did she know that was exactly what he had been thinking about? After his experience with the First of the Magi and the things that he and his brethren could do, he found himself wondering if she was reading his thoughts.

 _Nonsense_ , he sneered at his own worries. _She's an assassin and she put her hands on your fucking neck. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what you're thinking._

She pushed his head back into its previous position with a firm but strangely gentle hand.

"Try to relax a little." The words were a little louder now, her voice sounding harsh and broken.

What was the story behind that?

 _You don't want to know_ , Glokta told himself. _You really don't want to know._

He did try to obey, difficult as it was.

Fingers carefully prodded at muscles that felt stiff and hard as stone to him. He steeled against the pain to come. "Relax," she repeated.

One of his students had stopped his drill, watching what was going on on the other side of the fence instead, and got a painful swat from his partner's steel for it.

"Keep your attention on the fight," Glokta instructed. "You can't let anything outside of it distract you unless it's got the potential of interrupting your fight and killing you."

If she snapped his neck, that would probably interrupt their practice in some way, if only by the sudden lack of a teacher, but it was hardly going to threaten their lives.

Keeping his attention on the fighting wasn't a bad idea, though.

It was hard to keep his mind from drifting to the danger behind him, and the students paid for it, their instructor suddenly even more bent on calling out every toe put out of line, every finger that shifted from its intended position on the hilt.

As the lesson drew to an end, though, he could feel that the stiffness in his neck had, though not exactly evaporated, at least softened a little – and to his surprise, quite painlessly. He wasn’t used to that. People digging their fingers into stiff or cramping muscles brought pain. That was one of the lessons he had learned since he had returned from the Gurkish prison.

Actually, he had probably learned that before, though then the digging had been intended to cause pain, so he might have been excused for not making the connection.

"Your vertebrae are out of alignment," she told him in that low-pitched, hoarse voice of hers once he declared the lesson over.

He gave a short, dry laugh. "Hard to miss from the inside."

Her hands were still moving inch by inch up and down his neck, restlessly coaxing his muscles into obedience.

"Someone try to break your neck and fail?"

He resisted the urge to shake his head. "Locked me into a tiny compartment," he said. "Barely the size of a chest of drawers, too small to stand, too small to lie down, too small to straighten in any direction. I don't know how long they left me there. May have been months." It felt strange to talk about it, and he wondered at that. It wasn't as if he had never talked about it before. As a matter of fact, he had explained it in great detail to many of the people he had tortured over the years. He had shared a lot of his experiences in the Gurkish torture chambers with them. Quite often, the explanation in combination with a good view of his broken, twisted body, was enough to elicit a confession, people preferring life in a labour camp with a whole body to life in a labour camp in a condition comparable to his.

Why, then, was he feeling almost shy about sharing those experiences with these people? If what Mikal had told him was true, if they most or all of their elite had gone through something to render them what he referred to as dead but not admitting to it, they might even be in a situation to understand him better than anyone else had ever been.

Maybe that was precisely the problem.

"Don't try to fight me," she told him, a sharpness in her voice that hadn't been there before but was unmistakable.

"I'm not—" he started, feeling annoyance at the suggestion. He hadn't even tensed, to his knowledge.

This complaint was interrupted by a sudden, sharp pain in his neck, exceeding the usual level caused by his careless movements by far.

"Have you gone insane?" he almost screamed at her, twisting his entire body around to stare at her. "What have you done to—" Once again he broke off in mid-sentence as the pain subsided to its normal level and then kept ebbing away.

He gingerly turned his head from side to side.

No click. No spasm, no jolt of pain to punish him for it.

"What have you done?" he repeated, though now his voice was an incredulous whisper as well.

"Be careful with that," she warned him instead of answering. "You don't want them to snap back again."

Raising a hand, he rubbed his neck carefully, savouring the near-absence of pain. The dull ache that remained was hardly noticeable in comparison to what he was used to. "No, I don't," he agreed. "What did you do?"

"Force your neck back into alignment," she finally answered. "And I'd rather not have to repeat that, so don't snap them back out."

Glokta nodded, carefully, feeling his way through the movement. "I'll be careful," he promised. "I don't need to repeat that either."

He pushed himself to his feet, his back protesting as he straightened. His neck might feel better, but the rest of his spine did not.

Could she…?

He wanted to ask her, but he still hesitated. He didn't want to be in their debt any more than he already was. The prospect of at least reducing the ever-present pain in his back, though, was tempting.

His mouth opened almost of its own accord, and he clamped it shut again.

Was he really that desperate? He didn't even know if she could do the same for his back. He might never even have to come to a decision about asking if she had already done all she could.

"Thank you," he said, somewhat belatedly. "Is this… would it work for other parts of my spine as well? In theory, I mean."

A laugh was her answer, as hoarse as her speaking voice. It sounded quite painful. "Come, Sand dan Glokta," she said after a moment, reaching out and gently pushing him in the direction of the guest quarters. "Let's go to where you can lie down and I'll take a look. I can promise you that you'll feel very tired if I can get those big muscles in your back to relax enough to allow any such thing, and you don't want to fall asleep out here."

"I didn't mean to…" Glokta tried to object, sounding half-apologetic and half-defiant.

"Oh yes, you did," Vilya said. "Don't worry – I don't mind. And I'm not promising anything."


	13. Chapter 13

Glokta woke to a dull ache in his back reminiscent of times when he had actually lived an active life. A glance towards the window told him that it was not quite evening yet. He had taken Vilya's advice to sleep off the effects of her treatment, which had been just as she had predicted.

Before she had left, she had helped him turn onto his back and placed the cushions around him to keep him from twisting up needlessly.

He moved carefully, stretching this way and that by minute amounts, expecting the spasms and pain to catch up with him any moment.

When they did not, he spent another few minutes flat on his back, enjoying his pain-free state. It was a rare treat. He was almost comfortable – enough so for him to want the moment to linger. For a change, he was even comfortable enough to consider leaving out the 'almost' in his assessment.

Eventually, though, he decided that it was too early to spend the rest of the day in bed – he had spent far too many days in bed in his life already.

Pushing himself up, he dragged his legs over the edge of the bed and bent forward to reach for his discarded shirt, draped over a chair near the bed.

The pain shooting through his back caught him unaware and he yelped before he managed to bite down on his lip and stifle any more sounds of pain. His eyes were watering and his teeth were starting to ache from the effort of keeping his mouth shut. Was this really feeling worse than his usual spasms did, or was it merely because of the almost complete absence of pain in his back only a moment earlier?

Finally, Glokta managed to ease himself back down into the bed, hoping and waiting for the pain to subside.

It lessened only marginally. Glokta swore under his breath. Hadn't Vilya warned him of getting his spine out of alignment again by careless movements? He hadn't been aware that his movements had been careless, but apparently they had been careless enough.

One way or the other, there was no way he would be able to get out of bed like this.

Grinding his teeth and swallowing his pride, he called out: "I need help in here! Don't bother to pretend you're not there, I know you are!"

*

Glokta stared up at Mikal, who was standing next to his bed and looking down at him with a half-amused, half-wondering expression.

"What?" Glokta asked, his voice sharper even than he had intended. He was still trying to ride out the pain, fresh and sharp and as bad as on the worst of his days.

"I'm just surprised you let Vilya put her hands on your neck and back to begin with," Mikal told him. "That woman can break your neck or paralyse you at will with her bare hands."

Well, it wasn't like he hadn't suspected something along those lines on his own already. "She promised not to harm me." It sounded pathetic in his own ears. Mikal's eyebrows lifted in surprise for a moment - whether at the promise or at Glokta's trust in it, he couldn't tell.

"Besides, as you have pointed out before, no one's likely to harm me while your First wants her revenge on the badly playing client."

Mikal chuckled. "That is true," he admitted.

A knock on the door kept him from saying anything more. Instead, he opened the door to his colleague with a flourish. "Come in, come in. You are impatiently awaited."

*

"I think we need Lan in here," Vilya rasped.

It wasn't that they hadn't tried. Thrice Glokta had attempted to get out of bed while keeping his back straight enough not to do any new damage. Once, he had even made it as far as the door before the act of reaching for the door handle sent him to his knees in renewed pain.

Though he did not like the implications of her statement at all, Glokta nodded cautiously. Unless Lan had any ideas, he was apparently going to have the choice to either stay in his bed mostly free of pain, like right now, for an indeterminate period of time, or live with the agony of a spine twisting every which way for the rest of his life. Neither seemed particularly appealing.

*

He felt almost dizzy as he stood by the window. Everything seemed just a little wrong. The angle at which he saw everything wasn't quite as he was used to.

Glokta carefully rolled his shoulders, much more symmetric now than they had been. His head was a fraction higher up than it had been as well, his back straighter than it had been for many years. It didn't really have any other choice but to stay that way now.

Lan had set down the solution to his predicament quickly and determinedly, knowing and not caring that Glokta did not appreciate the idea.

'Stays', he called the contraption encasing Glokta's body from hips to shoulders now, a heavy leather-and-steel affair that inhibited movement and made it entirely impossible to bend over or turn without taking along his entire body.

It wasn't going to be forever, Lan said, though he couldn't tell him how long it _would_ be. For the time being, they were going to be his constant companions everywhere but in the bath.

Morning laps in the pond were put on ice for the time being.

Glokta surprised himself by how much he already missed them, especially considering how opposed he had been to the idea originally.

Admittedly, though, it had to be an acceptable price for being able to move almost without pain.

As a matter of fact, his leg was the only part of him that hurt on a regular basis now.

Walking had become more difficult again. With the stays keeping his back straight, he could not lean forward over his cane as he used to. His walks were going to be much shorter, though he had resolved to change that again.

For the first time in years, Glokta permitted himself to entertain the hint of a hope that his life could still improve considerably.


	14. Chapter 14

He wasn't sure if being able to actually eat was ever going to lose its wonder.

 

He wasn't even sure he wanted it to.

 

Meals had not been served to his room ever since he had been well enough to spend most of his day out of bed. Most of the time, he took them with the other residents of the Keep, in a large hall near the entrance to the largest building in the valley. He sat where Mikal had directed him the first time they had come here, at the edge of the section reserved for those who had completed their training.

 

The assassins had to have other ways of acquiring food – there was some fluctuation in that area of the hall, with some faces appearing only rarely while others could be seen nearly every day. The apprentice table at the other end of the room was much more consistently occupied.

 

The side of the room that Glokta had joined had three tables set up in parallel, with no apparent seating order other than that created by personal preference of a few. The Elite and the lesser assassins, as he had come to think of them, mingled without any obvious difference in rank. It took some very careful observation to discover minute differences in the way the former treated each other and the way they treated the rest.

 

"Don't you get tired of this?" Glokta asked as Mikal slid into the seat across from him. "Don't you want to go and talk to… your friends or something?"

 

"I like it where I am," the other man claimed, reaching out to snatch a bit of food from Glokta's tray.

 

The trays were the thing he liked least about the dining hall. Instead of being served, food was handed out on trays one was supposed to take to one's table. It was given out on a first come, first served basis, and if you dropped your tray on the way, you got to wait in line until it was your turn again.

 

He had only been thankful that the times it had happened, he had not had to actually clean up the spill. Apprentices did that, and they also cleared the tables at the end of the meal. All Glokta needed to do then was stack his tray on top of the others at one end of the table – and that he only did because it seemed right and wasn't much of an effort.

 

"Get your own food," he growled at Mikal, who laughed and looked pointedly at the line waiting to be served.

 

"I will, in a bit," he said.

 

Glokta glared, torn between eating faster at the expense of savouring his meal and watching part of his portion end up in his shadow's stomach.

 

Mikal, in the meantime, was looking past him. "I think in about…"

 

He broke off, his eyes no longer focusing on the line.

 

Curious about what was happening, Glokta shifted on the bench where he sat to turn. Twisting around to look behind you was not an option if your body was stuck in what was effectively a back brace.

 

A side door, usually shut as people used the main entrance to the hall, had been pushed open. If it had made any sound, it had been inaudible over the buzz that always permeated the room during mealtimes.

 

Three people had entered. One of them was Rinn. The other two he had never seen before.

 

The line parted for them and they stepped through smoothly, scarcely wasting a nod for the people around them. The gap closed up again the moment the last of the newcomers had cleared it.

 

"Well," Mikal said, keeping his voice low. "Didn't expect those two yet."

 

Glokta shot him a questioning glance that the other man responded to only by a mute shake of his head. With a shrug, he returned his attention back to his meal. Sometimes, silence and patience was all you needed to get the information you wanted.

 

Of course, Mikal never gave any information unless he intended to do so. On the other hand, he apparently liked to dangle bits and pieces of it just outside of Glokta's reach. Apparently, he quite enjoyed watching him wonder and puzzle things out – or fail to do so.

 

Most other times, he might even have obliged him and tried, but meal times were not the best moment to engage him with anything but food, at least as long as there still was any left on his tray.

 

Another few minutes passed in silence between them before his companion wordlessly got up and walked around the table. Straining his ears with some curiosity after all as he picked the last bits from his tray, he waited.

 

With a hint of disappointment, Glokta found that Mikal was not moving over to the others to talk to them. Instead, the assassin seemed to be quite content to get himself a tray of food and return to his place.

 

The tray was pushed halfway across the table, clearly an invitation for Glokta to share it. That was only fair, though Glokta had a hunch that it was mostly designed to give him a reason to stay at the table rather than leave and retire to his room, which would have forced Mikal to leave with him.

 

He humoured the other man for a while, slowly sharing the second tray as they waited.

 

They were just finishing when the newcomers finally came over.

 

Glokta tensed as they approached from behind him, shooting a jolt of pain up his back. It was nowhere near as painful as the spasms he used to experience, but it was a clear warning. He needed to get back to his room and lie down for a while soon, or else he'd pay for it later.

 

"So you're the former torturer we've acquired as a guest," one of the two observed out of the blue.

 

Glokta nodded carefully. "So it would seem." Why deny the obvious? He didn't know what they had been told about him, but it wasn't hard to single him out. He was still dressing in undyed breeches and shirts, and he was most probably the only person in the main part of the dining hall who hadn't been there when those two had left for their last assignment – which he assumed was where they had come from. It must have been far away, or very tedious, to keep them away for so long.

 

"Mind if we sit?"

 

"Go ahead." There was no point in refusing them – he couldn't have kept them from doing what they liked anyway, and he didn't need to make any of the assassins' elite angry at him for no good reason. That they were part of that specific group was clear the moment he looked up into their faces. They had that same look in their eyes, the same smile that never reached quite far enough, that Glokta saw every time he looked at one of his shadows – or, for that matter, into a mirror.

 

The bench shifted slightly as two men added their weight to Glokta's.

 

"I thought you'd be out for another month or two," Mikal said, also without bothering with a greeting.

 

The one who had spoken to Glokta answered. "There was no need to stay any longer. The situation changed."

 

"How so?" Glokta's shadow sounded only politely interested now. It was apparently not the news he had hoped for.

 

"They're all busy preparing for war," the newcomer said.

 

War? "With whom?" Glokta asked before Mikal could say anything. "And who's they?"

 

"With whoever had the nerve to land a fleet of warships at the coast," the answer came immediately. "Commanded by a Magus, they say, though I have not gone to the effort to actually confirm that."

 

"It may be true." Bajaz had told them what had become of the other Magi. One, he had said, had sailed away to other shores. Was this connected?

 

The assassin next to him shrugged. "May be true, doesn't matter to us, though. We don't fight in the army unless they hire us to do it, and they won't. They can take care of their Magus and their invasion any way they like. It's none of our business."

 

Against his will, Glokta found himself agreeing with that. The assassins would likely go on to serve whoever was in possession of enough money to pay for their services, no matter what happened to the country around them.

 

He wasn't sure how he felt about it himself, but there was another thought that insinuated itself into his mind.

 

If another Magus had come to invade the land Bajaz would be forced to act against him.

 

Bajaz would be distracted. Maybe, maybe he could use that to his advantage. He had no intention to live with the assassins indefinitely, certainly no intention to become one of them. Returning home, however, was out of the question while that man was still around.

 

Maybe that would change now.


	15. Chapter 15

His feet shoulder-width apart, he hoped that he would be able to balance out the impact as he met the practice steel coming at him with the one in his hand.

As he had noticed before, there was only so much that he could do by explanation, and without an accomplished swordsman to serve as an example, the task fell to him when all else failed.

So far, he could count the times he had gotten inside the practice yard and taken up the practice steels himself to exhibit the sad remnants of his skills on the fingers of one hand. Each time, they came with the same uncertainty. Would this be the time his students sent him into the dirt?

Steel met steel, and reflexes moved his arm, disengaging and coming around in a half circle, putting the tip of his blade – or what would have been the tip, had it had one – against the base of his opponents throat, where it rested lightly, just tickling without actually pressing down.

His back had felt the impact, but had mercifully decided to bear with it for the time being.

These days, the heavy, stiff contraption he had worn in the days and weeks directly following the rearrangement of his spine lay unused in the bottom of a trunk in his room.

His shirt covered a less awkward version of it, made of stiff leather that still restricted his movement and supported him, but without making it entirely impossible to turn or bend. Equipped with pockets all around, it could be stiffened with steel rods at need. It was a need he tried to avoid.

"Again."

He resumed his starting position and waited. He knew he should have more of his attention on his student, but given his relative slowness, he could probably afford to be lenient with himself in that respect.

The weapon was swung at him, and he pushed it away with a flick of his arm.

"Sloppy," he said, not even bothering to retaliate. "Again."

Blades met, met again, though the student's wavered at the second impact, and he took a step back out of Glokta's reach. That wasn't part of the pattern he was supposed to perform, and it drew a frown from the teacher even as he took a step forward to follow before he could wonder about the expedience of that move.

It threw him off-balance, as his whole weight rested on his bad leg for a moment, but somehow he managed to get the other one down again before anything more unpleasant happened. Somewhere, between his resumed laps in the pond, the walking he did in the valley and the help they got, his leg muscles were building up some small amount of strength. It wasn't anywhere near what he would have once considered adequate, but he could feel the difference. He could even feel the difference between being held up by the brace only and actually taking over part of the work himself.

Their weapons met one last time, and then his blade rested against the other man's neck, to the side this time, but no less deadly if they had been fighting an actual duel.

 _Nonsense_ , Glokta told himself. _If you'd fought an actual duel you would be dead now._

He sighed. "You don't move back unless you need to get some space for your next attack," he pointed out. "Once you let your opponent drive you backwards across the field, you have already lost. Try flinching less, and blocking more."

A number of reactions registered on the younger man's face before he settled on a curt nod and resumed position.

So did Glokta, half-surprising himself as he noted how quickly the stance from which he would start any practice sequence had come to feel natural to him again. If he had most of his weight on his good right leg, he could easily tell himself that there were many occasions in a swordfight where a man did not stand evenly.

It took them another three passes before they got through all five contacts of their sequence, and they were pushing the time allocated for their lesson as they finished the last. Refusing to be hurried, Glokta gave his student a few choice bits of advice what to practice before he let him run after the others.

He shook his head mutely as he looked after them for a moment, then, spotting movement from the corner of his eye, he turned.

There was Rinn standing by the fence, one foot comfortably on the bottom board of the fence.

"How are they coming along?" she asked when she saw she had his attention.

He moved his head from side to side vaguely as he walked over to her side of the yard. "Some better than others," he allowed eventually. "One or two might make it to contest level if they keep at it." He hoped she had not expected him to turn the entire lot into champions.

Her slow nod, acknowledging what he had said without reproach, suggested that her plans had indeed been of a more realistic nature. "Maybe you could start some of those others on something that'll be more useful on the battlefield," she suggested, continuing when she saw the surprise he couldn't quite suppress in time before it registered on his face. "When there's a war, sooner or later we get called upon to intervene, on one side or the other. Picking off an officer here or there can turn the tide, you know. Won't hurt if we have a team that can blend in with the army."

"I said I'd give fencing lessons, not train your lot to pick off my fellow officers," he almost growled, just as an unbidden thought intruded. "That wasn't one of your people who stuck a lance through my leg back then, was it?"

That actually brought a laugh from her. "My people don't leave their target alive to tell the tale," she claimed. "That was just another Gurkish soldier. Your 'fellow officers', though?" One of her eyebrows twitched upwards in amusement. "Are you thinking about re-joining your army? That'd go a way towards getting back your old life, I admit."

Though said lightly, the words chilled him immediately. Had he really allowed himself, even for a moment, to think of himself as an officer again, as Colonel Glokta, not Glokta the torturer, Glokta the cripple, Glokta the magus' pet?

How and when had that happened?

But here he was, barely leaning on the fence as they talked. From a little distance, he probably looked like any other man now, with only the ever-present cane giving away his shortcomings.

And the cane, he realised, was still leaning against the other fence, where he had left it to take up the practice steel.

Rinn had followed his eyes, her lips twitching into a smirk that could have been a smile if it had touched her eyes. "Maybe not quite yet," she suggested, as if he had confirmed her earlier question. "You've come far in a few months, but there's still more ahead of you."

Without giving him an opportunity to respond, she turned and strode away, leaving him alone with the thoughts now planted in his head.

She certainly had the right of it there. He had come a long way since he had arrived in this place, or since he had first ventured out of his room here. It wasn't just that he was moving more easily than he had in years. He knew the face that looked at him from the mirror every morning. It no longer bore much resemblance to the Arch Lector. It wasn't quite Colonel Glokta either, of course. It never would be, not with the traces of torture carved into it irremovably. Not with all the years added to it either.

Still – if he could come this far at the age of thirty-six, where could he have gone at the age of twenty-seven, if he had had the same resources at his hands then?

 

*

 

It was a long, narrow piece of wood, put there at one end of the fencing yard at his instruction, and he couldn't quite decide if it was beckoning to him or mocking him.

Once he had danced on a beam like that, steel flashing in his hand. A lifetime ago, it had been as easy for him as walking on flat ground. Easier certainly than walking on flat ground was for him now, even though he was getting better at that.

He knew it was a stupid idea the moment he put his foot on the beam.

It hadn't been so narrow when he had been younger, had it? There had been plenty of space on it for his feet then. For a short while, though, he stood, swaying only slightly as he tried to find his balance. His back was certainly not enjoying the exercise, but that was hardly out of the ordinary. His back enjoyed very few things. At least these days it did so without causing him to almost double over in pain.

He found a precarious kind of balance and shifted his weight slightly. Just a few steps, he told himself, just to see if he could.

Only seconds later, he found himself kneeling on the ground next to that treacherous piece of wood, eyes watering from the pain shooting up through his leg and hip, driving home just how much pain he hadn't felt in weeks.

The brace on his leg only worked when he had his weight on the leg and the foot flat on the ground. Balancing on your toes didn't work if the front of your boot was stuffed out for lack of actual toes. No matter the improvements, his bad leg did not take his weight without help, and probably never would.

Angrily, he wiped at the water flowing from his eye. He wasn't going to –

What? Cry over the things that were still lost to him? The reminder that no matter what improvement he had achieved, he still was and would always be Glokta the cripple?

He started climbing to his feet, stopping the motion immediately when the pain renewed – not the stabbing agony from a moment ago, but the kind that accompanied fresh bruises.

A new thought intruded. Back when he was younger – back when he trained for the Contest – he'd been used to hurting. Minor injuries happened in training. Muscles protested, strains occurred, you fell into bed feeling sore and rolled out of it feeling not much better. You kept on working and it would get better. Eventually. Or not. But you'd push your limits one by one.

When had he grown so afraid of pain?

He heard himself laugh, a dry, mirthless sound.

Must have happened at some point during the two years in a Gurkish prison. And years of daily agony after that just to get out of bed, never mind the rest of the day.

He'd done what he could with what was left to him, of course, in spite of the pain. He had avoided it where he could, but he hadn't had a lot of opportunities to do so. It had just been everywhere.

Now, he realised, he could avoid it, most of the time.

He could probably go for days at a time feeling barely more than a slight twinge now and then if he was careful.

Careful would be safe. He was able to walk, and while he usually carried his cane, he was using it less on short distances. It was much more than he had ever thought possible. Even if this was all he ever got, it was better than anyone would have given him credit for. Why, he might even think about starting that new life, somewhere else. He could probably pass for some veteran soldier now, suffering from war wounds badly healed.

Or he could face the pain – the other pain, that came with exercise a body was unused to – and see how far he could push his limits. He was too old to practice for the Contest now, and too broken, but he could use some of the same principles to find out just how broken he still was.

While still mentally scolding himself for even contemplating such a thing, Sand dan Glokta slowly but deliberately climbed to his feet, placing his bad leg with care to make sure it held under his weight.

"Mikal," he said, raising his voice without even turning to see if the man was there. Of course he would be. He knew their rosters by now, and if they were anything, then it was reliable when it came to not letting him wander the grounds on his own, even now.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man's shape approach a few steps along the outside of the fence.

Glokta didn't turn towards him. Instead, his eyes rested on a building he had never been into during his stay here. "I need access to your guild hall."

"Is that all?" The assassin's voice sounded amused, though Glokta wasn't entirely sure if it was because of the outrageousness of the request to be permitted where they were surely conducting the most secretive parts of their business, or because he actually did find the suggestion funny for other reasons.

He nodded, slowly, as he tilted his head to follow the lean shape of the building's solitary tower up, and up. It was the highest structure in the valley.

"The stairwell. Just—just get me access to that stairwell."


End file.
